icloudmacos
I have moved a large folder with many subfolders to my iCloud drive. If I dig around I can catch a status bar next to a file name (same as during a download), but it seems to be taking a lot longer to upload than I would think. Besides catching an upload in progress I don't see a way to tell what has been uploaded or is waiting. Is there anything I am missing?
Dropbox had a nifty menu bar icon that would display progress and pending files.
Having Documents & Data active doesn't mean that your documents get saved to iCloud. Some applications might choose to store settings and data that could be shared between your devices. If you disable Documents & Data you disable this possibility.
You can always check your iCloud account if there are any documents already saved. Go to 'System Preferences -> iCloudand clickManage`. You can here see what applications that are using the storage.
You can see that in my case I have documents from Pages and TextEdit. I have chosen to save them there. It's not anything that your computer do automatically.
I'm myself also using Dropbox for documents but I really see no reason to deactivate iCloud Documents & Data
Guesswork, but the bad news is you should have switched it off before reverting, if at all possible.
Looking through the various QAs at Apple forums would tend to lead to the conclusion that once you have upgraded to iCloud Drive it cannot be reverted. You may be able to switch it off from https://icloud.com but I can't test as I have never enabled it on my machines.
Apple have never been too concerned about people wanting to rewind.
General iCloud Drive info from Apple doesn't cover it, nor does the switching off iCloud Drive FAQ
Best Answer
Yosemite
You can watch individual files in Finder, but there's no GUI for the progress of iCloud changes.
El Capitan
In El Capitan and later a progress bar can be accessed by clicking on the wheel in the Finder sidebar.
https://georgegarside.com/blog/macos/all-the-little-things-osx-el-capitan-hidden-features/#icloud-drive-upload-progress-indicator (my blog)