iCloud File Size Limitation

Can somebody clarify if i want to add files that are on my local drive, will these files then be doubles up on the local drive due to the automatic sync?

If you want only one copy of an iCloud document on your Mac, move the documents to iCloud drive and do not copy them there. Then the only version of the document on your Mac will be the one you are seeing in the iCloud Drive folder. This document will be stored on your Mac; all local copies are stored inside the user library in your home folder. The advantage is, that this way the documents are all available, when the internet connection is not working or internet is not available.

How about this for craziness? My iPhoto library (about 33 GB) synced TO iCloud Drive but now is not accessible locally. So apparently you can copy a large file TO iCloud but you'll never see it again.

How about this for craziness? My iPhoto library (about 33 GB) synced TO iCloud Drive but now is not accessible locally. So apparently you can copy a large file TO iCloud but you'll never see it again.

The new iPhoto versions are checking, if the drive is compatible, before opening a library. iPhoto has not been designed to be used as a network photo library. It is a single user application and requires the library to be stored on a locally mounted volume. Syncing an iPhoto library on a network volume is a sure way to corrupt it.

If you value your photos move the iPhoto library back to a local drive. The only supported way to share a photo library on a Mac is a "sneaker drive", see this Help text: iPhoto: Sharing libraries among multiple users

Yeah it was totally unintentional for this to happen and I can't get it to download from iCloud Drive now. I'm amazed it uploaded the file at all to be honest. Now I'm just working on tracking down a way to copy it back.

I have a solution for you. There is a program called WinRAR, it should be available on Windows and Mac (go to the RARLabs site to obtain a copy and install on your computer making sure that it is located in the /Applications/RARLabs directory), but on Mac I believe there is only a command line version so you will have to learn to use that. In any case, you should create an archive by opening /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app and then typing on the command line /Applications/RARLabs/rar a -t -m5 -v2000M -R <archive path,name>.rar <path to folder>. Setting the archive size to 2GB will probably be the best bet as this will be compatible with FAT32 volumes and it also will reduce the chance that you are backing up to a bad sector as most drives have at least a dozen bad sectors. iCloud Drive does support the RAR filetype, I just tried it with a program I wrote. Now if only they would add a MD5 function so you can verify the upload went correctly.

Ok, now that you have the split archives, create a folder for the specified content and upload each split archive separately to iCloud Drive. If you want to be safe then I suggest you run the md5 program in the /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app program on each split archive and write the results down and then it is a good idea to download whatever you uploaded and make sure the md5 values match. After that, you should be good to go, iCloud has multiple layers of redundancy and unlike the traditional hard disk, the chance of your data becoming corrupted are close to the odds of being struck by lightning, and that is the best you can get with the technology we are using.

The one thing I have noticed is that (Win)RAR does not support the rtfd format because it is technically a directory. You can of course report any other files it does not work with, but my suggestion would be to put any files that are also directories into a zip file before converting them to a rar file with maximum compression level -m5. The only other option would be to convert the directory-file into a flattened file type. So anything like .app or .rtfd or any other file type that is also a directory in addition to being a file is not going to be compressed correctly, they must somehow be stored as a single file in the way that all the contents of a webpage are for instance stored as a webarchive. Often, you can convert directory objects into different file types and the problem is solved, but usually the best solution for backing up an application is to store all of it in a zip file. Of course, you could also store any type of files in a disk image (dmg) as well before compressing them with rar and this approach may actually work better in some instances. However, you won't need rar for files with lossy compression like images and can just use a disk image for that, compression is mostly successful for files that have a lot of repeating patterns in them, the best file type for compression is usually an application or other executable. ALWAYS re-download what you have uploaded, using the md5 program in /Applications/Utilities/Terminal.app to check that the original file md5 matches what you just uploaded then extract everything and pay attention for files with weird file names, this is an indication of an unsupported file type (you will also find those files missing from the extraction). Once you have identified any incompatible file types then you can do as suggested above with all of the files of unsupported types and combine all files (including the converted ones), compress them again and re-upload and test this out again (convert, compress, upload, download, check md5 sums, extract and make sure that all of the files are there). I know this a bit involved, but you will get the hang of it in time. Compressing can save a lot of space on your iCloud account (depending upon the file type of course) and you certainly don't want to drag and drop thousands of files when you could just drag and drop one or a handful of split archives. Of course, you can upload your most frequently updated documents separately, but the fact is that we often have a lot of documents that don't get updated that often and so the compressed archive solution is usually the most practical for the vast majority of your files.