The Practical Guide To Mac Security: Part 14, iCloud Drive

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Here's Part 14 of my course The Practical Guide to Mac Security. This course is brought to you free thanks to my great Patreon supporters. Join us by going here. 

So let's take a look at using iCloud Drive in terms of security. iCloud Drive can be seen as both a negative and a positive. The negative part is a lot of people perceive storing files in iCloud Drive makes things less secure. After all the value in iCloud Drive the files are in your computer in your house all locked away and nobody can have access to them online. But if you put them in iCloud Drive they are also on Apple's servers which you think would make them more vulnerable. But in fact that's not the case.  If you use a weak password and no two-factor authentication then it can make it easy for somebody to get to your files. But as long as you're using a strong password and two-factor your files are encrypted and it's very difficult to get to them. On the other hand using iCloud Drive could be a great way to prevent data loss because if your files are only on your computer or even on your computer and a backup that's stored in the same location it could be easy to lose your data. However, if you store them on iCloud Drive it's kind of a like a very simply online backup. Your files exist also on Apple servers. Take the situation where say you lose a MacBook. Perhaps you lose your MacBook and the Time Machine backup. You could simply buy a new MacBook, log into your iCloud account and all your files are there. Not only do you get everything back but it's done easily and effortlessly just by logging in. All your files reappear. There's no lengthy and difficult restoring process. This could also be very useful in cases where data loss isn't really that important. A lot of home users basically they simply use the Mac for browsing the web, checking email, doing basic things and setting up a backup for somebody who has very basic uses may add a level of complexity. But turning on iCloud Drive doesn't. Everything seems to operate just as it did before. All your documents are in your Documents folder. All your Desktop files are on the Desktop. Yet everything is stored in iCloud Drive. So if they lose their Mac or it breaks they can simply get a new one. Log back in and they might not even realize that their ever was a time when their data was in danger. It just seems to always be there just like it was before. 

You also can access your files on the web in an emergency. So say if you lose your MacBook or it's temporarily down for repairs for a few days or something like that and you need to get to a file, if you're using iCloud Drive you could go to any computer. You could log into iCloud.com, access your files there and get to files that you need. So it has a layer of security there as well. 

So the best practice is, and I'll show you some examples here in a minute, use the Desktop and Documents folder option. This means that your Desktop folder and Documents folder are automatically part of iCloud Drive. You can continue to operate as you did before with your files, say, in your Documents folder mostly and not have to change anything. It's just automatically part of iCloud Drive and you can continue to work as before. This also prevents you from putting important files in your Documents folder and not having them be part of iCloud Drive.

There's an optimize feature that I'm going to show you and whether you have that On or Off really changes how everything works. If it's Off then all your files are stored on your Mac and on iCloud Drive Apple servers. If it's On then things are Optimized. Everything is stored on Apple servers but only recent files and files your Mac may think you need soon are stored locally. Everything else needs to be downloaded on demand. So if you want a copy of all your files locally and on iCloud Drive simply turn off Optimize. Also, it's easy to setup a local Documents folder. This allows you to store files locally. Just because you're using iCloud Drive doesn't mean you only use iCloud Drive. Let me show you how these work.

So here I am in the Finder and I have iCloud Drive turned On. I could see in the Sidebar here iCloud Drive and then also it gives me quick access to my Documents folder and my Desktop folder which is empty here. The settings for this are in System Preferences. Go to Apple ID, select iCloud from the left and there's iCloud Drive. Checkbox means you have it turned On. Go to Options and this is where you turn On or Off Desktop and Documents' folders. So if you have that turned On then your Documents folder is part of iCloud Drive. If I were to use Go, Documents I end up here. Documents folder is both local and part of iCloud Drive. If I were to turn this Off then Desktop and Documents would disappear from iCloud Drive and they would be local. 

Now let's take a look at my Home folder here. If I look at my Home folder, this is my local Home folder, and you could see here I don't have a Documents folder or a Desktop folder. That's because they are part of iCloud Drive. So iCloud Drive is where those are stored, right there, and my Home folder doesn't have those. However, I can created any folders I want in here. I've created one called Local Documents. Inside Local Documents I've put some files that I specifically don't want to be on iCloud Drive. For instance I may have some huge data files that are many GB in size but they're not that important. I'm just using them to process some data say. I could put those in my local Documents folder and not worry about them taking up space in iCloud Drive or using my bandwidth as they transfer back and forth between iCloud Drive and my local computer as I make changes to them. Also, folders like Movies, Music, and Pictures this is typically where your iMovie files or Final Cut Profiles are stored. You can also create your own folders in Movies to store videos which are typically large files. Your Music Library storing music and your Photos Library is storing pictures. These are large files and these are stored here in the Home folder, not part of iCloud Drive. So these large items will just be stored locally. iCloud Drive then holds mostly your Documents and Desktop folders. 

Other apps often create folders for specific uses. This is less and less now. So if you have a new Mac and you're setting up things new you're probably going to have fewer of these folders. In the future there will probably be none. Probably just have Desktop Documents and then any folders that you create on your own. So you can create your own iCloud Drive folders, name them anything you want, and store anything that you want in them. They will be part of iCloud Drive. 

So there are some downsides to iCloud Drive but they are pretty minor. First is realize that iCloud Drive is not a backup like Time Machine. So it's not going to save every file that you've got and it's not going to have older versions of those files. It's just going to have every file that you've got. Not older copies of them. So it's not ideal as a backup. It's better than nothing for a user or maybe if you're helping somebody maintain their Mac and setting up a backup for them is going to be too much for them to be able to handle. Then having them with iCloud Drive means that you have some backup. You've got the files stored in more than one place at least. There is, of course, an extra cost to iCloud Drive. Hopefully that's not an issue for most people that use Macs since Macs are more expensive computers in the first place. Also it's not good for massive files like video projects. Not so much because of the storage space although that is a factor but also because of transfer times. So unless you have a super super fast connection to the internet if you're say editing a 100 G video file and then that has to be synced to iCloud Drive on the server that's 100 G that needs to be transferred just if you make one little change. If you make several changes over the course of several days that's a lot of data back and forth which is one of the reasons those massive files you may want to keep locally in your Home folder in a local Documents folder or in the Movies folder or something like that. 

Now iCloud Drive isn't the only game in town. As a matter of fact there are a lot of options that have been around even longer. DropBox is a really popular service that's been around for a long time. The advantage of DropBox and these others is they are cross platform. While you can have iCloud Drive on Windows, you get an extension for Windows that adds iCloud Drive to it, it's a tough sell if you're working with people in a collaborative environment and they are on Windows and you're on Mac you know to get them to install that and everybody can use iCloud Drive. Chances are you want to use something just cross platform like DropBox and it works in the same way iCloud Drive does and you could just have DropBox as this folder. You put things in and it's both local and stored on the server. The same with Goggle's Goggle Drive service or Microsoft OneDrive service. A lot of companies offer basic iCloud Drive type services and the main advantage is to using one that is not iCloud Drive is either cross platform, sometimes price, sometimes you get a little better price, and sometimes there are special features that these have that you may want to use. 

So one last thing I want to show you is the Optimize feature here. So we go back in System Preferences to your Apple ID and iCloud. Here is the Optimize Mac Storage option. So in this case my MacPro has a very large hard drive in it. I have this turned Off and everything that you see here in iCloud Drive, all of these files, everything in Documents here, they are all on my local hard drive. If I were to disconnect from the internet, shutoff WiFi, all these files would be there in their entirety on my drive and I can work with the, edit them, and I would never have any issues if I'm not connected to the internet. On the other hand if I were to turn on Optimize what would happen is that some of these files would still seem to be there. But they would be empty files. They would be containers that wouldn't have the data in them. So perhaps a large file, let's take a look at the largest file here maybe something here at this video file, maybe it hasn't been opened in a long time and it eventually would still say 60 MB, it's right here. But if I were to try to play it, it wouldn't be on my local hard drive. Instead what would happen is a download would start and it would download from iCloud Drive. It would fill in this empty file, this kind of envelope of a file, would fill in with the contents and then it would open up. If the file is small enough I may not even notice that it is doing that. It may just happen so quickly. But that would mean that I would save 60 MB of space on my drive. Maybe with this file I would save 32 MB. Maybe this whole folder I would save 100 MB. So you save a lot of space. So this is how you can have iCloud Drive and say have a terabyte of data in iCloud Drive but maybe only a 512 GB drive on your Mac because the files that are oldest, the ones that you haven't accessed in the longest amount of time, those would be on the server but be basically empty shells on your local drive until you go to access them. So you can actually have say 300 GB of files on your Mac locally even though it shows that you have a terabyte worth of files. Just that 700 GB of those are only on the server until you need them. 

That's a very handy feature but you have to think about what you want. In this case I have a Desktop Mac that has a very large hard drive. I have this turned off on the Desktop Mac. So all files are both local and on the server. However, I also have a laptop. The laptop has a much smaller drive in it and this is turned on. I am using the same iCloud account. There's no way I could have this turned off on that laptop. There's just not enough room on the hard drive. But by turning it on it appears I have access to all my files and indeed I do as long as I am connected to the internet any file I go to get that's not cached locally I'll be able to access without a problem. It will simply download it quickly and then open it up and it looks like I've accessed all of my files on my laptop as well as my desktop even though I'm using different optimize features. So really get to understand this and whether or not you want to have this turned On or Off.