9/7/21
9:00 am

Storing Files Locally When Using iCloud Drive

Sometimes you may want to store files in iCloud Drive, and sometimes you may want to store files on your local drive. Depending on your settings, you can have both at all times. Or, you could use one of two methods to put some files either on iCloud Drive or only locally.

Check out Storing Files Locally When Using iCloud Drive at YouTube for closed captioning and more options.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let's talk about using iCloud Drive by forcing some files to be stored locally. 
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So when you use iCloud Drive everything is stored in one virtual location. That's on iCloud Drive. You see those files on your Mac but they are also stored on Apple's servers. Then you can see them with all your other devices. But what if you want to store some files in iCloud Drive and some files locally. I'm going to show you three methods including one you shouldn't use, one that may solve all your problems with no hassle, and another one that will allow you to decide which files are on iCloud Drive and which files are not. They're just stored locally. 
The first method I want to  show you is actually simplest but whether it's for you depends on what you really want. A lot of times when people ask me how do I make sure files are stored locally even though they are on iCloud Drive what they really want is their files to be in iCloud Drive but to make sure they are also on their Mac at all times so if they're off-line they can access them. In this case all you need to do is go to System Preferences. Then click on Apple ID. Make sure you have iCloud selected. Now at the bottom you should see optimize Mac storage. If you have that turned on that means all of your files are always on iCloud Drive. Always stored on Apple servers. But files are only stored on your Mac if there's space and if you recently accessed the file or your Mac predicts that you might need that file soon. So you could find yourself in a situation where your off-line and you don't have access to your files because your Mac didn't store a local version. There doesn't appear to be any difference to you. All your files look like they're there. It's only when you try to open them that it then tries to access them on iCloud Drive. But if you have this turned Off, like I do, then every single file on iCloud Drive is also on your Mac. So you never have to worry about whether a file is available online or off-line. All files are available whether or not you're online. The down side is you're limited by the storage on your Mac. So you could only have as many files as you have space on your Mac. If you're in a situation where you have a very small drive, say a 256 G hard drive on your Mac but you have more than 256 G of files then you could certainly store more on iCloud Drive but you'll have to use this Optimize Mac Storage feature because your Mac simply can't fit all of those files. 
If you need to access all your files off-line then you definitely avoid this problem by making sure you only buy Macs that have enough internal storage. Otherwise you might see something like this. Here I am in my Documents folder and I see next to this folder here this icon telling me that there are items in this folder that are certainly there on iCloud Drive but I don't necessarily have local versions of them. If I look in the folder I could see the status of each file. So if I were to try to access this file now while I'm online it would simply download it on demand. I may not even notice a difference. But if I'm completely off-line there is no way to download it from iCloud Drive so trying to open this file won't work. But I could Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad on the file and select Download Now. It would download this file. I'm telling iCloud this file is important to me. I want to make sure I have a local copy. Now I should be good for awhile. At some point in the future it may decide, well you didn't really access that file that often so I'll offload it. But at least for the time being I have it available. I could even select this folder here. Choose Download Now and now it's going to download everything in there. So you'll see those little icons go away and now I have all of the stuff available even if I'm off-line. I can also select a file, say a large file,  Control Click it and Remove Download. So just that one file now is no longer available. I could use that to save space. 
Now what if that's not your situation. What if your situation is you want to have some files that aren't on iCloud Drive at all. They are only local to your Mac. For instance you may have a folder where you're storing video projects and you don't want all that stuff to be uploaded to iCloud Drive. You just want it to be local. One method you'll see a lot is to use dot nosync after a folder or file name and it tells your Mac not to send this file to iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive won't see it at all. Now I don't recommend this method. The third method I'm going to show you, that's the one you should be using in this situation. But if you really want to do it you could take a folder like this. You could put at the end of it dot nosync just like that. Now you'll see the icon changes to a cloud with a line through it. That folder will no longer be in iCloud Drive. Anything you add to it will not longer be in iCloud Drive. But I recommend not using this at all. It's not really technically supported. It does work and it could be confusing. You could easily forget why a folder isn't appearing in iCloud Drive because you didn't remember that you added this to it. This is not a good method.
A much better method is to simply create a local folder on your drive for local files. You see if you have in System Preferences under Apple ID iCloud you have under Options, Desktop & Document folders turned On then your Documents folder and your Desktop folder are part of iCloud Drive. As a matter of fact if you look in the regular place for those by going to your Home folder you won't see Document & Desktop there anymore. They've been removed from here and they are actually in iCloud Drive now. But your Home folder is all local files. These are files not in iCloud Drive. So you can simply create another folder here. I've created one called Local Documents. In here I can put documents that aren't part of iCloud Drive at all. They're only on this Mac. iCloud Drive had no idea they even exist. This is a much better solution than nosync. Just setup a local documents folder, call it what you want. You could setup a variety of folders here if you want with a different name. Anything you put in your Home folder is not going to be on iCloud Drive. I recommend you don't try to create a folder here called Documents and certainly not one called Desktop because that would be confusing to have two folders with that name. Then it would be difficult to figure out when you're saving a file to your Documents folder whether it's the local one in your Home folder or the one on iCloud Drive. So don't use those names. But certainly something like Local Documents makes sense. You could even use some of the existing folders. Like there's a Movies folder here where all of your video data for things like iMovie and Final Cut Pro would be stored. That makes sense because those files are usually massive and storing them on iCloud Drive isn't always the best idea. But you could also create your own things in Movies. For instance if you have a collection of some video backgrounds that you want to sometimes use, they are too big to store on iCloud Drive. Instead of creating its own folder you could always create something under the Movies folder. It kind of makes sense from an organizational standpoint. 
But any folders that you create here in your Home folder is going to be Local, not on iCloud Drive. Then anything you create under iCloud Drive would then be synced with iCloud Drive. So you have complete control there. There's no reason to use .nosync on folders. If you don't want to have to jump from your Documents folder to your Home folder you could just setup aliases. So, for instance, here if I have local documents and I don't want to have to go to a different location to see those I could drag, hold down Option and Command, and it will create an alias and put an alias inside of my iCloud documents folder. Now in iCloud Documents I see Local Documents. I jump to the Local Documents folder inside of my Home folder. It works really well if you use Column View. In Column View, here I am looking at iCloud Drive. I could go into Documents and then to Local Documents and it appears to flow down into this like Local Documents is really inside Documents. It's not. It's an alias. This won't be synced in iCloud Drive because it's not really inside the Documents' folder. It's just an alias going to another location on your drive. 
So there are a few alternatives for you if you just want to make sure all your files are available locally when you're off-line. Just turn off the Optimize feature. Otherwise if you want to create special folders that are never synced to iCloud Drive create them in your Home folder. Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.

Comments: 21 Responses to “Storing Files Locally When Using iCloud Drive”

Jasper

4 months ago

Dropbox’s cloud service has a feature called, I think, ‘selective sync’. This allows you to have cloud-based items syncing differently on different Macs. E.g., you might only want personal items on a personal Mac and work items on a work Mac. Am I right in thinking that there is no way to achieve this in iCloud?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Jasper: Well yo do have the Download Now / Remove Download option for files and folders. But nothing exactly like the Selective Sync feature.

Jeff

4 months ago

HI Gary, Why have the documents/desktop folder checked for iCloud at all?
Then you can individually choose where to keep a new file when going to save it.
Just go to file with option key held down and save as. This gives you much better control
of each and every file. Also, how does mac save a file by default? to iCloud or locally? (IF you just click save).
Can you change the default setting?
Thanks, Jeff

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Jeff: The Desktop is different than all other locations, as items in it show on the Desktop. If you want that to be in iCloud too, then you need to use this option. There are also shortcuts that take you to Documents, so it is useful to have that folder in iCloud too. You have absolute control whether you use it or not. But most people (me) prefer to keep all of their files in Documents, and having that folder in iCloud then requires that setting. Default really depends. It should remember your last location.

bruce louis

4 months ago

I would like to completely eliminate iCloud. I have a feeling that Apple has just cracked the door on spying on files. I have further heard that they are using china companies to store icloud data. Are there any tips for completely cleaning out all of my cloud data and completely detaching from iCloud

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Bruce: Because of the CSMA controversy? Apple announced they are putting that on hold. Also, other cloud services like Google have been doing that for years with hardly a complaint from anyone. As for storing data in China, Apple and other companies do that — but for customers IN China. If you really want to move away from using cloud services and back to local files only, it is just a matter of moving your files and data to locations on your drive and then when iCloud is empty, turn it off. Just think about all of the iCloud services and go through each one: files, photos, Calendar, email, music, keychain, etc. It will be tough to go back to manually syncing this data across all of your devices, so take that into consideration.

Mick

4 months ago

Hi Gary. Many thanks for making this tutorial. It has clarified this whole subject for me. I have loads of space on my devices and have needlessly been using the “Optimise Mac Storage” option. Thanks Mick

Mick

4 months ago

Gary … a thought…Is the “Optimise Storage” only available as a feature on Macs? I can’t find any similar settings on my IOS devices? Cheers Mick

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

Mick: There is no Finder on iOS. You use the Files app to access files in iCloud. There is no way to have all of your documents downloaded and stored in iOS. It acts like “Optimize” is always on.

bizstuff

4 months ago

I want some files to have both a local and cloud representation. Ex: I use Lightroom and need fast access to the Catalog (several gigs), but I would also like the security of knowing that I have a cloud backup. Is there a way of doing this somewhat automatically?

Gary Rosenzweig

4 months ago

bizstuff: If you want them to be in iCloud, then they need to be in iCloud. No way around that, right? So there is only one solution. Turn off Optimize so all of your files are always cached locally too. You’ll need a drive large enough to handle it, but that would be true anyway if you want the files always available, right?

Bernard

3 months ago

Hi Gary, hope you don’t mind to answer one more question. Is it necessary to have a backup of all the files stored in my iCloud (note: I am using Optimise Storage thus only a small portion of these files are in my local storage), in case iCloud crashes and I end up losing the only copy of most of the files stored there? If yes, how do I do that? I am using Time Machine but I think it can only backup iCloud files that are synced to my local drive and not those in the cloud, am I correct? Thanks.

Gary Rosenzweig

3 months ago

Bernard: There’s really no way to do that. Since you don’t have the space on your local drive you can’t download all of your files. Since you can’t download all of your files they simply aren’t present locally so you can’t back them up. I don’t know of a solution for this situation other than getting a much larger drive next time, or storing less in iCloud, or manually downloading files in iCloud.com (the web site) and meticulously archiving them to an external drive. Maybe doing that only with critical files?

Jackie Bruno

2 months ago

How do I find my home folder and how do I add add the new folder named “Local Documents” to my home folder? I understand your extremely helpful video but being somewhat new to Mac I sometimes lack the more basic skills to implement your great suggestions . Is there a link you can direct me to. I am using macOS Monterey. Thanks so much.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 months ago

Jackie: In any Finder window, you can choose Go, Home as a way to get there fast. Then File, New Folder will create a new folder and you can name it. See https://macmost.com/understanding-the-file-and-folder-structure-of-your-mac.html for some info on how your Mac is organized.

Razvan Mihai

2 months ago

Gary: If Desktop and Downloads are synced by iCloud, and you have two Macs, what would be your recommended way of keeping track between two different (?) Desktops and Downloads assuming there is enough hard hard drive space on both devices? Thanks!

Gary Rosenzweig

2 months ago

Razvan: You mean Desktop & Documents (not Downloads). You don’t have to keep track of anything. Those two folders would look identical on both Macs. They would act as one location, showing you one set of files no matter which Mac you are looking at. That is how cloud storage works. See https://macmost.com/understanding-icloud-drive-and-the-optimize-mac-storage-option.html

Razvan Mihai

2 months ago

Too many D’s! Thanks for clarifying this. I was under the impression that Downloads might sync the same way as Desktop or Documents folders do, as long as the iCloud settings are on.

Razvan Mihai

2 months ago

Gary: While tidying up my files, I noticed under iCloud the Downloads folder accessible on Mac and iPhone. It seems that this is where files get downloaded on iOS. I am now wondering if it is a good idea to set the Mac to download to this folder so that files be accessible on all devices and get the same level of integration as with Desktops and Documents.

Gary Rosenzweig

2 months ago

Razvan: I wouldn’t. When downloading things like apps it would be useless to have access to them on iOS. And when downloading content Downloads should be treated as a temporary place where you receive the file and then move it to where it should stay for the long term.

Razvan Mihai

2 months ago

Gary: Thanks. I have renamed the Downloads folder under iCloud to “Downloads iOS” to clarify where the files downloaded on iPhone and iPad go and avoid confusion between the two different “Downloads” folders. It works flawlessly.

Storing Files Locally When Using iCloud Drive

Comments: 21 Responses to “Storing Files Locally When Using iCloud Drive”

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