There are several colleagues who have asked me what to do to not be so overwhelmed with the automatic synchronization of MacOS Sierra And it is that whatever you place on the Desktop and in the Documents folder will be sent to the iCloud cloud, as long as you have space, and give maximum importance to the EU point if you deactivate the function, the files that prevail are those of the cloud and not those of your computer.
The first thing that I have told these colleagues is that if they do not like how this synchronization works, they should deactivate it and that work with the iCloud Drive location in the sidebar of the Finder window.
We have been able to have our files saved in the iCloud cloud for many months now and when we activated the iCloud Drive service, that category and everything that we will find there automatically appeared in the Finder sidebar, it was saved in the cloud and we had it accessible from any device or computer.
However, Apple has wanted the process to be much more hidden from the user, that is, the user does not realize that the synchronization is taking place. For this it has decided that in macOS Sierra the user can decide if the Desktop and Documents locations are synchronized automatically and in the background with iCloud.
I have already said that this question is asked by the macOS Sierra system since you open it for the first time when you install it and if you are not very safe or secure do not activate the option until you read a little about how it really works.
Well, these colleagues have already activated the new synchronization on their Macs and they tell me that they do not want to stop using it and it is that they see very feasible that it is the system itself that does the dirty work of taking all the files and saving them in the cloud. Nevertheless, they are not very satisfied with all the files uploading to the cloud and they have asked me for help to know where to locate a folder to save locally.
For a medium-advanced user it is not a problem and it is that we can activate in Finder Preferences that it shows us the hard disk and within our user we create the folder for local storage. But since all users are not so experienced, we tell you how to do it:
1st You must open the Finder and in the upper menu Finder click on Preferences.
2º In the window that opens we must click on the tab Sidebar and in the items that appear, we activate the one on the hard disk and in this way the hard disk will appear in said sidebar.
3º Now we click on the hard disk and a Finder window opens in which we can locate a folder that we will call LOCAL FILES and that we will use to host all the files that we want to have on the computer but not in the cloud.
It is clear that this that we have commented to you is a "patch" that we should not do, but it is the way in which we can combine the cloud with the LOCAL. If you don't like this way, it is best to disable the Desktop and Documents sync and work only with the iCloud Drive location in the Finder.
And isn't it easier to open the folder you want within your username? Those don't sync!