uploading parts of documents and desktop folders to iCloud

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uploading parts of documents and desktop folders to iCloud

Updated question, 2021:

I just misunderstood this explanation of what iCloud does:

"When you add your Desktop and Documents to iCloud Drive, all of your files move to iCloud"

That's not what I was expecting. I found, and still find, that this language is imprecise. Not misleading, just not clear and adequately specific. The language could be improved, however.

I understood the language literally to mean that the files were moved to iCloud the same as moving files from one folder to another, like when you move from one house to another. That would leave room for more stuff in the place you left. With iCloud, we rent another house, and duplicate the stuff, and lend it out to our friends. But if we back out of the rental, then if we are not careful, all our stuff will be taken out of our house as well. Try that when you turn off iCloud, where your documents are in iCloud Drive. Confused? Start it all over again, but use only one file, to see how it works.

Even more troublesome than that misunderstanding, however, is that when enabling iCloud Drive for documents, it evidently "takes" every document away, to the Cloud, including those I do not wish to share. I want to share some documents-- some selected documents--just those documents I choose for a specific reason. This may be confusing, of course. I'm not a technical writer, either.

It confounds me still, because even after reading up on this subject and asking the questions, I do not know if it is even possible to save a just few files in iCloud. To position some in iCloud, and not on the computer, would be useful; and leaving some on the computer, and not in iCloud, also. A both/and proposition.

Either way, the same amount of data is stored on the disk. Check with "About this Mac/Storage" to see how the data is presented in the graph, and it's a wash. I can live with that, it's ok.

In case there is a doubt as to my question: is it definitively the case, that when Documents is enabled in iCloud, that it applies to each and every document in the Mac Documents folder, without exception, and without a workaround? Can't I just choose some stuff to put into iCloud Drive?

This post is about my Mac, it is signed in to iCloud, and it relates to iCloud on my Mac running OS High Sierra.

Thank you for your interest in the question.

Posted on Apr 26, 2021 9:40 PM

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Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

léonie

Level 10

197,705 points

Apr 26, 2021 10:45 PM in response to oldfashioneddoughnut

You are right - "Moved" is a bit misleading - the Documents folder and Desktop folder will be moved out of your user Home folder to the cloud section of your sidebar alright, but it does not tell us directly, that the Mac will be keeping local shadow copies and use as much storage as before. iCloud is primarily a syncing service, keeping the documents and data on all our devices identical and updated. To save local storage on your Mac you have to enable "Optimise Mac Storage" in the iCloud Preferences. I avoid this option, as I prefer to have the local copies, so Time Machine can still make backups of my documents and data. Having to make backups of the iCloud Data manually is too much work for my taste. And more important, I want to keep my data locally available, so I can can access them always and fast, even if the internet should be not available or slow.

When I started to use iCloud Drive to be able to keep some documents and data in iCloud, I did not enable the "Desktop & Documents" option. This way I could selectively drag only the documents and data to iCloud Drive in the sidebar, that I wanted to be able to access from all my devices.

Later, when I changed my mind and wanted to sync the Desktop folder completely with iCloud, I removed all documents and subfolders from the Documents folder to a new folder "Documents Local" in my user home folder, outside "Documents". Now the documents folder in iCloud was empty, but my desktop did sync with iCloud.

Which system version do you have installed? Since macOS 10.15 or newer we can control manually which files and folders we want to keep locally. To remove the local shadow copy of a folder on iCloud Drive select the folder in the Finder and ctrl-click it. Then use the command "Remove Download". The folder or document will remain in iCloud, the local download will no longer take up storage on your Mac.

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Answer 2

Apr 28, 2021 2:21 PM in response to léonie

Yes, thank you for helping clarify that way to optimize iCloud. My mid-2010 27" Mac is running 10.13, though. I was starting to think maybe the age of the OS was to blame.

Just for fun, yesterday I tried renaming the Documents folder itself, which is impossible I found, but that making a new folder such as you suggest, which would be visible in a Finder window (eg DocumentsNotCloud), would keep the files safe from being drawn into iCloud, so long as I remember to save files to the NotCloud folder instead of the Pages default iCloud. In other words, Don't take this to the Cloud."

(I also logged in my iCloud.com page to see the opportunities available to control my data storage there, which were constrained by the lack of columnar view, but there is the Deleted folder which will hold files 30 days.)

I'll need to remember the meaning of "Remove Download," because the term doesn't match what my brain understands by "remove" and "download". That would seem to mean that the file goes up, and then comes back down--when if fact, it never leaves the Mac at all. (Which is good, because I think maybe that Time Machine still has everything, even if it went to iCloud.)

That brain of mine wants to give it another term--"Upload the File to iCloud only, Do not store it here at all".

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uploading parts of documents and desktop folders to iCloud

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