Unable to download my icloud files to my mac

I disabled the 'optimize icloud' that used to keep a lot of my icloud space on my Mac.

Now I am trying to download everthing on my icloud in order to back it up to an external ssd drive.

I tried first copy/paste, but it is forever stuck in "preparing to copy". Tried also to download the icloud folder with no success.

It gets even stranger than that. I created a folder called: alldocs on the icloud root. It does not seem to have all the files and folders I have moved there. Instead, icloud created a folder called alldocs 2 and that one seem to have all my content. Why is that? It shakes my confidence with icloud. I only care about files that are not photos and the once I have placed manually on icloud. Tried also logging into icloud thru the web and the download icon is greyed out for my folders. Thanks for any clue.