Read this if your Mac basically doesn't work anymore because of iCloud Drive

December 1, 2025

I was recently going insane trying to figure out why everything on my Mac was DeathGod slow.

• Apps were taking forever to open
• Finder was unresponsive
• The whole system felt like it was about to die

I was actually in the process of moving things out of iCloud, which was taking literal days. And I was thinking I needed to replace my Mac altogether.

Then I did another 37 AI/google searches and found some hints. Here's what I ended up going with.

The problem is basically these giant cache files of contents on iCloud. They live in places like this:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/FileProvider/*/database

What mine looked like

What to do ​

1. Open Terminal and go to the FileProvider directory:

cd ~/Library/Application\ Support/FileProvider/

2. Open it in Finder so you can see what you're working with:

3. Go into the folder with the long UUID string (like in the screenshot above)

4. Go into the database folder inside that

5. Delete everything inside the database folder:

1. Restart your Mac

First of all, I had a 44 GB file in one of mine.

44 gigabytes.

No wonder the system couldn't do anything. It couldn't read the cache file describing what was in the folder, let alone being able to do anything with it.

When you delete those files, it forces iCloud to regenerate its local database from scratch. I didn't lose any data, and things started working within just a couple of minutes.

Very soon after doing this and restarting, you should see your computer basically come back to life.

Hope it works for you!