Can I upload files to iCloud Drive without syncing them to my MacBook?

Question

Can I upload files to iCloud Drive without syncing them to my MacBook?

I only have a 128GB SSD in my MacBook, and looking to upload about 500GB of data to iCloud Drive, where I have 2TB of space... for the life of me I don't see any way I can upload what I want to to iCloud Drive, since my MacBook storage isn't larger than what I'm trying to send.

It seems strange to only be able to sync between my MacBook and iCloud Drive with iCloud Drive... in my case I have ~500GB on an external USB hard drive I'd like to have up on iCloud Drive just in case something were to happen to the external drive.

Thanks for any guidance!

Posted on Aug 19, 2018 8:06 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Eric Root

Level 10

685,245 points

Aug 19, 2018 12:47 PM in response to Community User

iCloud is a syncing system, not an external 'hard drive'.

For what you want to do, you need a different cloud based solution such as Dropbox, OneDrive, or Flicker.

Reply

Answer 2

Aug 21, 2018 10:10 PM in response to Eric Root

Sure enough, I even talked to Apple Support, and they suggested I *could* use iCloud Drive similar to Dropbox - as just external storage - without syncing. That turns out to be false... I copied the way they guided and it ended up copying to my laptop and syncing. :-/

Reply

Can I upload files to iCloud Drive without syncing them to my MacBook?

Similar questions