How do you change the iCloud Drive and Photos storage location on a windows pc? I have 2 drives, and my primary volume is too small to hold everything, whereas my data drive has more than enough room, I want to put it on my secondary drive, but iCloud installs everything default on c: and It never asks me where to install it. Any ideas?
By default, iCloud for Windows stores your synced files in folders inside your username's path, which in most cases resides in disk C. In my case, for example, iCloud Drive's folders and files were copied to folder C:\Users\falomain\iCloudDrive when I enabled the iCloud Drive option after installing iCloud for Windows.
Although I have plenty of space on my C drive, I prefer to keep all my personal content on an ever larger drive H, so I extrapolated Kalibur06's method of moving Photos to the case of Drive and it worked perfectly. This is what I changed on
Kalibur06's steps:
Origin folder: "C:\Users\falomain\iCloudDrive"
(Note: do NOT type the space between iCloud and Drive here)
Destination folder: "H:\iCloud\iCloud Drive"
(Notes: I have read on distinct places a recommendation NOT to place iCloud's sync folders directly in the drive's root, e.g. H:\iCloud Drive"; you can freely use spaces in folder names here)
IMPORTANT: If you later decide to move your files to a different location, use the iCloud's default as Origin folder and change the Destination folder only. In fact, you can continue to use the default path to access your iCloud Drive files because Windows will 'mask' the physical (destination) location with the original path, although storage space will be actually taken from the destination drive.
My thanks to @Kalibur06 for the excellent article.
By default, iCloud for Windows stores your synced files in folders inside your username's path, which in most cases resides in disk C. In my case, for example, iCloud Drive's folders and files were copied to folder C:\Users\falomain\iCloudDrive when I enabled the iCloud Drive option after installing iCloud for Windows.
Although I have plenty of space on my C drive, I prefer to keep all my personal content on an ever larger drive H, so I extrapolated Kalibur06's method of moving Photos to the case of Drive and it worked perfectly. This is what I changed on
Kalibur06's steps:
Origin folder: "C:\Users\falomain\iCloudDrive"
(Note: do NOT type the space between iCloud and Drive here)
Destination folder: "H:\iCloud\iCloud Drive"
(Notes: I have read on distinct places a recommendation NOT to place iCloud's sync folders directly in the drive's root, e.g. H:\iCloud Drive"; you can freely use spaces in folder names here)
IMPORTANT: If you later decide to move your files to a different location, use the iCloud's default as Origin folder and change the Destination folder only. In fact, you can continue to use the default path to access your iCloud Drive files because Windows will 'mask' the physical (destination) location with the original path, although storage space will be actually taken from the destination drive.
My thanks to @Kalibur06 for the excellent article.
I have this problem with Windows 10, too. I found an article (and lots of copies and translations) solving the issue by creating a 'symbolic link' but it does not work for me. No matter what's the new location, iCloud won't save the files on the computer anymore until you undo the move.
I would appreciate any help, also in scorpnet's name, thanks.
Thanks Falomain.
I followed the procedure, created the link etc.
When I rechecked the iCloudDrive box in iCloud settings, it renamed the link "iCloudDrive Archive" and created a new iCloudDrive folder (on the original C drive)
Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.
Oh did you need to re-check? That's not my experience. Try leaving the iCloud Drive option checked first and then proceeding with link creation.
Thanks for sharing this! I'm pretty sure that it would happen to me, too, if I would need to restart the iCloud Drive connection for any reason in the future!
Good luck, JFM48!
File locations for iCloud for windows.
