Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today
let's talk about using iCloud Drive by forcing some files to be stored locally. MacMost is brought to you thanks to a
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content and course discounts. So when you use iCloud Drive everything is stored
in one virtual location. That's on iCloud Drive. You see those files on your Mac but they are
also stored on Apple's servers. Then you can see them with all your other devices. But what
if you want to store some files in iCloud Drive and some files locally. I'm going to show you
three methods including one you shouldn't use, one that may solve all your problems with
no hassle, and another one that will allow you to decide which files are on iCloud Drive and
which files are not. They're just stored locally. The first method I want to show you is actually
simplest but whether it's for you depends on what you really want. A lot of times when people ask
me how do I make sure files are stored locally even though they are on iCloud Drive what they
really want is their files to be in iCloud Drive but to make sure they are also on their Mac
at all times so if they're off-line they can access them. In this case all you need to do is
go to System Preferences. Then click on Apple ID. Make sure you have iCloud selected. Now at the
bottom you should see optimize Mac storage. If you have that turned on that means all of your
files are always on iCloud Drive. Always stored on Apple servers. But files are only stored on your
Mac if there's space and if you recently accessed the file or your Mac predicts that you might need
that file soon. So you could find yourself in a situation where your off-line and you don't have
access to your files because your Mac didn't store a local version. There doesn't appear to be
any difference to you. All your files look like they're there. It's only when you try to open them
that it then tries to access them on iCloud Drive. But if you have this turned Off, like I do, then
every single file on iCloud Drive is also on your Mac. So you never have to worry about whether a
file is available online or off-line. All files are available whether or not you're online. The
down side is you're limited by the storage on your Mac. So you could only have as many files
as you have space on your Mac. If you're in a situation where you have a very small drive, say
a 256 G hard drive on your Mac but you have more than 256 G of files then you could certainly
store more on iCloud Drive but you'll have to use this Optimize Mac Storage feature because
your Mac simply can't fit all of those files. If you need to access all your files off-line
then you definitely avoid this problem by making sure you only buy Macs that have enough internal
storage. Otherwise you might see something like this. Here I am in my Documents folder and I see
next to this folder here this icon telling me that there are items in this folder that are certainly
there on iCloud Drive but I don't necessarily have local versions of them. If I look in the folder
I could see the status of each file. So if I were to try to access this file now while I'm
online it would simply download it on demand. I may not even notice a difference. But if I'm
completely off-line there is no way to download it from iCloud Drive so trying to open this file
won't work. But I could Control Click, right click or two-finger click on a trackpad on the file
and select Download Now. It would download this file. I'm telling iCloud this file is important
to me. I want to make sure I have a local copy. Now I should be good for awhile. At some point in
the future it may decide, well you didn't really access that file that often so I'll offload
it. But at least for the time being I have it available. I could even select this folder here.
Choose Download Now and now it's going to download everything in there. So you'll see those little
icons go away and now I have all of the stuff available even if I'm off-line. I can also select
a file, say a large file, Control Click it and Remove Download. So just that one file now is no
longer available. I could use that to save space. Now what if that's not your situation. What
if your situation is you want to have some files that aren't on iCloud Drive at
all. They are only local to your Mac. For instance you may have a folder where you're
storing video projects and you don't want all that stuff to be uploaded to iCloud Drive. You
just want it to be local. One method you'll see a lot is to use dot nosync after a folder or
file name and it tells your Mac not to send this file to iCloud Drive. iCloud Drive won't see
it at all. Now I don't recommend this method. The third method I'm going to show you, that's the one
you should be using in this situation. But if you really want to do it you could take a folder like
this. You could put at the end of it dot nosync just like that. Now you'll see the icon changes
to a cloud with a line through it. That folder will no longer be in iCloud Drive. Anything
you add to it will not longer be in iCloud Drive. But I recommend not using this at all.
It's not really technically supported. It does work and it could be confusing. You could
easily forget why a folder isn't appearing in iCloud Drive because you didn't remember that
you added this to it. This is not a good method. A much better method is to simply create a local
folder on your drive for local files. You see if you have in System Preferences under Apple ID
iCloud you have under Options, Desktop & Document folders turned On then your Documents folder and
your Desktop folder are part of iCloud Drive. As a matter of fact if you look in the regular place
for those by going to your Home folder you won't see Document & Desktop there anymore. They've
been removed from here and they are actually in iCloud Drive now. But your Home folder is all
local files. These are files not in iCloud Drive. So you can simply create another folder here.
I've created one called Local Documents. In here I can put documents that aren't part of
iCloud Drive at all. They're only on this Mac. iCloud Drive had no idea they even exist. This is
a much better solution than nosync. Just setup a local documents folder, call it what you want. You
could setup a variety of folders here if you want with a different name. Anything you put in your
Home folder is not going to be on iCloud Drive. I recommend you don't try to create a folder
here called Documents and certainly not one called Desktop because that would be confusing to
have two folders with that name. Then it would be difficult to figure out when you're saving a file
to your Documents folder whether it's the local one in your Home folder or the one on iCloud
Drive. So don't use those names. But certainly something like Local Documents makes sense. You
could even use some of the existing folders. Like there's a Movies folder here where all of your
video data for things like iMovie and Final Cut Pro would be stored. That makes sense because
those files are usually massive and storing them on iCloud Drive isn't always the best idea. But
you could also create your own things in Movies. For instance if you have a collection of some
video backgrounds that you want to sometimes use, they are too big to store on iCloud Drive. Instead
of creating its own folder you could always create something under the Movies folder. It kind of
makes sense from an organizational standpoint. But any folders that you create here in your Home
folder is going to be Local, not on iCloud Drive. Then anything you create under iCloud Drive
would then be synced with iCloud Drive. So you have complete control there. There's no reason to
use .nosync on folders. If you don't want to have to jump from your Documents folder to your
Home folder you could just setup aliases. So, for instance, here if I have local documents and
I don't want to have to go to a different location to see those I could drag, hold down Option and
Command, and it will create an alias and put an alias inside of my iCloud documents folder.
Now in iCloud Documents I see Local Documents. I jump to the Local Documents folder inside of
my Home folder. It works really well if you use Column View. In Column View, here I am looking at
iCloud Drive. I could go into Documents and then to Local Documents and it appears to flow down
into this like Local Documents is really inside Documents. It's not. It's an alias. This won't
be synced in iCloud Drive because it's not really inside the Documents' folder. It's just an
alias going to another location on your drive. So there are a few alternatives for
you if you just want to make sure all your files are available locally when you're
off-line. Just turn off the Optimize feature. Otherwise if you want to create special
folders that are never synced to iCloud Drive create them in your Home folder. Hope you
found this useful. Thanks for watching.
