As they say, YMMV and this is only me, but I know I'm not the only person who is a longtime user of Apple *computers* and who would rather not save the same humongous image/video collection twice, both on the computer and in the 'hidden' (but real) storage space set up on local (Mac) devices. I'd go with the solution someone suggested of more options, by device, whether to store locally or only on the cloud, or both - especially if you're incurring monthly parking fees. That all works great for the iPhone fan, but my life (old fogey that I am) has me doing work at a big hi-res screen, with big images - and large files. But true, they're actually taking up local space, which is why I'm here weeding out photos. (I don't auto-cloud the massive-sized video/photo stream from the iPhone.) So now I've gotten another new huge storage drive, but my local Macs still are full of iCloud AND Dropbox files which I'd hoped to temporarily leave 'in the clouds' (what a misnomer!). So each device is synced for what I need for work while each device handles the huge doses of photo and video images I feed them, on their own hard drives. I'd need a 2nd mortgage were I to 'rent space' for all of that. I have several Terabytes of photos, about a TB of them on my Mac, and nearly 500 GB on my rMBP.

The things I want to sync are 'in the cloud' AND on the local devices. As others described accurately (and helpfully, without contradiction by Apple I note), the cloud drive organizes shared things one opts into - for example, I sync calendars and email so I have what my desktop and laptop have while traveling with only an iPhone (it would be the same w/iPad). It's the Achilles heel for me, storage, and simply on principle (and with so much of my own local storage capacity in my office) I'm not going to pay monthly fees forever to store my own things elsewhere *and* have it continue to eat up all my Macs' drive space, even if I send very little to 'the cloud'. In fact, I found this discussion while in the midst of having to 'thin out' the drive on this rMBP, which is 500 GB. In the event you haven't gotten it yet (or for others wondering who this may help), I would definitely invest in the largest possible SSD hard drive, if you deal often with photos &/or videos, professionally or otherwise.

Why does my google drive say its full