Stop Finder from uploading Documents and Desktop

Have you tried a restart? I've found the iCloud Document sync often requires a restart if a process gets stuck.

Yes I have tried restarting, resetting pRAM, restarting com.apple.bird, etc. Desktop & Documents Folders sync is off in iCloud Settings, yet my Desktop and Documents folders are in iCloud Drive (locally), This process is still trying to upload (I can't get it to stop!)

Copy all of your documents and desktop on iCloud and move it back to the computer. If you go to finder you will find the iCloud Drive with your dekstop and documents folder. Just copy or drag the contents and move it to the desktop/documents folder on the sidebar of finder. Unchecking the sync should stop it from syncing. Restarting the computer should fix the issue of it syncing assuming it's still doing that.

Simply dragging doesn't work. Going into the iCloud Drive "folder" which is really at ~/Library/Mobile Documents you will find that you cannot drag and drop most items out. The Finder puts the little "not" circle on it regarless of where you try to drag it. I even tried a freshly formatted thumb drive (128G) as the drag target and no go. What you end up having to do is the Windows-style "copy" a folder and then "paste" a folder to copy your data from iCloud, then you manually delete... but that's not easy either...

Deleting the exfiltrated items from iCloud is also painful. For some reason it seems you must drill down into each folder at the root of the iCloud Drive and delete the contents, and only then after the cloud system settles, can you delete the folder itself... but not always. The most painful is that iCloud Drive actually prevents you from deleting "Desktop" and "Documents" in the iCloud Drive.

When you have walked each folder such as "Desktop", "Documents", "Numbers", "Pages", ad nausium, and you have repeativally deleted the items at the root of the iCloud Drive which it reports cannot be deleted because of some error (in the browser interaction), you can then delete the individual folders except for Desktop and Documents.

But more importantly, this is a serious security breach in the system. macOS surreptitiously exfiltrated what would normally be critical and very private data folders and files from a customer's home directory to the "iCloud Drive" without their knowledge, permission, or any indication it was doing so.

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