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Moving large quantity of files from external HDD to iCloud

Hi there.

I have 1TB of files on an external HDD.

I want to upload them to iCloud drive (where I have 2TB of space). The only way I know of is to copy the files from external HDD to iCloud Drive on my Mac.

But my Mac has only 100GB of local space, and my attempts to copy the external HDD files to iCloud Drive seems to eat up the local storage capacity of my Mac...

Is there any way to "bypass" the local storage limitations of my Mac?

Thanks in advance!

Cheers

Fab


MacBook Pro

Posted on Oct 23, 2021 8:15 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Oct 23, 2021 8:39 AM

No. iCloud Drive is primarily a synchronization service, not offline storage. As space becomes low on your Mac, files will offload to iCloud only. But, the files will still persist on your Mac by design.

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9 replies

Oct 24, 2021 6:43 PM in response to WESTCOASTHOPKINS

You wrote, "removing them from iCloud on the Mac (to make space for the new files) will remove them (within 30 days) from iCloud."


I'm still confused about how this works. Why would he need to remove them from *iCloud* on the Mac? To make space for new files, he would only want to remove the files locally. But you're saying that if he deletes the data from his Mac's SSD, they can't stay in iCloud Drive either?


Why couldn't Apple design iCloud Drive to sync and also simply store data? Why are they making me use Dropbox as well?

Oct 25, 2021 7:46 AM in response to muguy

Thanks for answering my question. I am not entirely happy with how iCloud Drive works. It would be nice if Apple let you upload the data to iCloud Drive and keep it there as long as you kept an alias of the file on your device. Hopefully they'll do that one day. Perhaps you or someone else can chime in on why that would not be feasible.

Moving large quantity of files from external HDD to iCloud

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