Hey everyone, I'm in a bit of a panic and really need some safe, step-by-step advice. I cannot afford to lose any of my data—it's all super important study and work material.

The Situation:

I somehow had iCloud Drive turned on with "Optimize Mac Storage" active, which offloaded my Desktop and Documents folders to the cloud. I hate not having offline access to my files, so I decided I want everything stored locally on my physical hard drive with zero reliance on iCloud.

The Problem:

I tried to download everything back to my Mac, but it’s a massive amount of data (around 58 GB). My Mac's physical hard drive completely ran out of space mid-download.

• The download progress bar in Finder got permanently stuck.

• My laptop started getting incredibly hot.

• Because it's stuck, I tried to just go into Settings and turn off "Desktop & Documents" sync to sever the connection entirely.

Where I am stuck right now:

When I try to turn off iCloud Drive, I get this pop-up warning: iCloud Drive needs to finish updating before being turned off. Your documents will be downloaded and copied to a folder named 'iCloud Drive (Archive)' in your home folder on this Mac

It gives me two options: Cancel or Stop Updating and Turn Off. The progress bar on this pop-up is completely frozen because my hard drive has 0 bytes of free space left.

My Constraints:

1.	I cannot delete any of my existing local files to make room.

2.	I absolutely cannot lose the files currently trapped in iCloud.

3.	I just want to turn off iCloud entirely and get my stuff back on my local drive.

My Questions:

If I click "Stop Updating and Turn Off", will it permanently delete the files that haven't downloaded yet, or are they still safe on iCloud.com? What is the safest way to break this frozen loop and manually get my files back onto my Mac permanently?

Thanks in advance for any help!

Mac ran out of space while downloading files from iCloud. Now I'm stuck and can't turn iCloud off.