How to access iCloud files for external drive backup?

iCloud Drive works like you think---except, as muguy says, it's not quite the same when you have "Optimize Storage" turned on. Then, to save storage room, some files are kept off your Mac's internal drive until they are needed. This is great for saving storage space, but if the files of off the Mac to save storage, then they can't be backed up! I don't use Optimize on my Mac for that very reason. If you want to backup your Mac's files, then they have to be on the Mac!

If you want to turn off "Optimize," then you need to force the files to download to your Mac-- just turning off Optimize doesn't do that. You can download them one at a time by right-clicking on a file and choosing "Keep Downloaded." Or, you can grab a bunch of files in iCloud Drive and drag them to another folder on your Mac (forcing them to download,) and then the drag them back to iCloud Drive.

See this:

Understanding iCloud Drive - Apple Community

What do you think?

willywonty wrote:

When I use an external drive to save my data and create a bootable clone for safety (using SuperDuper in my case), a number of files are invisible to SuperDuper and therefore don't get copied to the drive.

Does this mean that files in iCloud are unavailable to me (or SuperDuper) unless I actually click on them?

I have not used SuperDuper but Carbon Copy Cloner has Cloud Storage option for this:

"Cloud Storage" source option automatically enables the "Temporarily download cloud-only files to make a local backup" setting. When this setting is enabled, CCC will temporarily download cloud-only files that are not yet on the destination, or that are newer than the corresponding file on the destination. After copying the temporarily downloaded files, CCC will "evict" the files to free up the space that they consumed. CCC attempts to retain no more than 100 files and no more than 2GB of temporarily-downloaded content at a time.

https://support.bombich.com/hc/en-us/articles/20686419951767-Backing-up-the-content-of-cloud-storage-volumes

iCloud is a synchronization service. If you elect to optimize files, files offloaded to iCloud only status would not be present on your device.

Matti Haveri wrote: …Carbon Copy Cloner has Cloud Storage option for this

I did not know that! That's pretty cool! Thanks for that! I haven't used CCC in quite a while, and I see that I'm two full versions behind!

I'm not sure why SuperDuper thinks "It's overly complex;" it's pretty what we'd have to do by hand, anyway.