Where is the physical iCloud drive on OSX Yosemite?

Can't disagree ... just reactivated my inSync / GoogleDrive accounts ... "Sorry, Steve, at this rate, your crew ain't gonna' keep your promise to put DropBox out of business", lol ...

I called Apple Support again and waited another 45 minutes to talk to someone only to be cut off after asking my questions so I am asking here ... Can anyone support these questions?

1. How to locate and move my physical iCloud Drive folder to an external drive...

2. How to auto-sync files after returning to the internet after an outage...

The physical folder for iCloud Drive on your Mac is the folder ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents in your hidden User Library.

The contents of this folder is invisible, when you try to view it directly, but you can see it in a Terminal window, if you open the Terminal.app and copy and paste this command into the Terminal:

ls -aix ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents

It will type a list of all folders and files currently on your iCloud Drive. Since this folder is in your User Library, you can only relocate it to an external drive by relocating your User Home folder to an external drive. This way your user library will be on the external drive.

The iCloud folder is hidden, try this...

USERS / User_name / Library / Mobile Documents / com~apple~CloudDoc /

I'm doing this from memory, but it should be close...

FYI:

the top folder, Mobile Documents, is what the iCloud icon in the Finder sidebar opens. The other Mobile Documents folder with the numbers in the folder name are what you see when you go to iCloud.com and enter the iCloud Drive section there. Both are in your Home/Library folder.

OT - It looks like you are still on Mavericks. You can't find the folder for the Yosemite iCloud Drive here as it's missing the "com~apple~CloudDoc" folder.

No, I'm running Yosemite with XtraFinder enabled so that I get colored icons in the Finder and color labels. That folder is invisible. Download and run Find Any File to search for the folder. FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages. If there's a library hiding somewhere on your hard drive FAF will find it.

However the Mobile Documents in my screenshot gives me these sub folder:

whereas the com~apple~CloudDocs only gives me this this one folder:

If you make all invisible files visible this is what the iCloud Drive icon in the Finder gives you:

I can't explain the differences, only show them.

You can't find the folder for the Yosemite iCloud Drive here as it's missing the "com~apple~CloudDoc" folder.

In ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs I am only seeing that part of my iCloud Drive documents, that are in custom folders and not in the predefined folders com~apple~Pages, etc.

If you don't have custom folders besides the predefined folders, you will not see this folder, even in Yosemite.

If I open a Terminal I will see all my iCloud Drive documents in subfolders of ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ and my own custom folders in ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs.

You can check that in the Terminal by typing

ls -aix ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/

and

ls -aix~ /Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

OK, I see what the problem is.. I omitted this... the "com~apple~CloudDoc" folder is created when you create custom folders on iCloud Drive. So if you create, say, a folder named "junk", it will show up in the "com~apple~CloudDoc" folder. Try that, and and see if it comes up for you.

Yep... I just posted, and then saw that you beat me to the punch. I think (could be wrong) that this folder will also add in other folders like "Pages" if they are populated with any files.

a) the name of the folder is: iclouddrive an it's hidden in your home folder

b) there a many but i give you two ways to make this folder visible: b1) dowload tinker tool app and make hidden folders visible

b2) 'download "easy find" app ( anyway a recommendation)

and search for "iclouddrive" and then alt-click "reveal in finder"

i needed that to include iclouddrive into an automator script which would sync my dropbox each night with my google drive and now

as well with iclouddrive automatically via calendar alarms or manually by double clicking the automator app icon on my desktop.

b2 will work without making invisible folders visible, you can open the invisible folder from within easy find as to changing location of that folder

i recommend a symlink which i use to access mail app in my encrypted diskimage ( sparse bundle disk image ) which i mount seperately

independently of mounting the machine, so however will access my machine will never be able to access the data on my 2

heavily encrypted sparspbundles, thus my email, so i need a symlink to open mail from the dock or form elsewhere and this could work

for iclouddrive as well, albeit not tested, worth a try. good luck

After having the same query of where the physical location of iCloud Drive was on the Mac (at least in Yosemite), I believe I may have found it. If you navigate to

/Users/<your_username>/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/

Hope this helps, if at least a little to your quest.

~deleted because I didn't see page 2 where someone already recommended the same thing as me, sorry!~

~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/