[iMore Question]

I have uploaded 378 gigs of material, including my Photos library, plus some raw files I want to back up, into my 2TB iCloud Drive. I know this by checking iCloud storage in my Manage Storage preferences. That means I should have 1.2 TB storage remaining, right? However, as I try to copy files onto iCloud Drive in the finder of my iMac, the finder thinks I only have 104 GB remaining and won’t let me copy more than that amount of stuff. In know there are "invisible files", but I am 99% sure that the 378 gigs of material I uploaded should not have invisibly ballooned up to over 1 TB... and I would think "Manage STorage" should show the accurate amount of free space left. Any suggestions?

[Tartarus]

I have uploaded 378 gigs of material, including my Photos library, plus some raw files I want to back up, into my 2TB iCloud Drive. I know this by checking iCloud storage in my Manage Storage preferences. That means I should have 1.2 TB storage remaining, right? However, as I try to copy files onto iCloud Drive in the finder of my iMac, the finder thinks I only have 104 GB remaining and won’t let me copy more than that amount of stuff. In know there are "invisible files", but I am 99% sure that the 378 gigs of material I uploaded should not have invisibly ballooned up to over 1 TB... and I would think "Manage STorage" should show the accurate amount of free space left. Any suggestions?

While you may have 2TB iCloud storage, the physical storage on your hard drive on any computer or Mac will be the limiting factor.

Say, if your iMac has only a hard drive of 500GB, you will not be able to put more data on that drive than 500GB, no matter how big your iCloud storage is.

To make it even more confusing, that 500GB hard drive will already have your os running on it and other personal and system files in other folders, making the total available storage for your iCloud Drive even less than 500GB.

Your best bet is to get a 2TB external hard drive and associate the iCloud Drive folder with it so you can fully utilize your iCloud Drive.