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femke112 Author

Level 1

4 points

I want to back-up my files from external hard disk to iCloud drive, without them being copied to my mac. Is that possible?

I am a photographer and keep all my pictures in an external network hard drive. Since I wanted a back-up of these files in the cloud, I have purchased extra iCloud space to back-up everything in my iCloud drive. While transferring everything, I now see that all these files are also saved in the IcloudDrive folder on my mac. This is obviously not what I want. My mac is almost completely full now.

Can I do anything about this?

Posted on Dec 29, 2019 11:28 AM

Top-ranking reply

LACAllen

Level 8

43,506 points

Posted on Dec 29, 2019 5:31 PM

iCloud is a syncing service, not off device storage. Its design is to keep content synced between your system hard drive and iCloud.

You can optimize the photo storage from your system Photo databases, which will dramatically reduce the local storage needed, but there is no way to simply store your photos on iCloud only.

You need another service such as Dropbox etc.

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I want to back-up my files from external hard disk to iCloud drive, without them being copied to my mac. Is that possible?

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