You can use iCloud either to backup your iDevices' data and also as storage for your personal files, just like those saved in your HDDs disk.
Where?
As you said, instead of saving those files in your iCloud folder in your Mac, you can go to the
iCloud website and login with your own Apple ID credentials.
How?
After you've logged in to your iCloud space, you'll get to the main screen where you can see all the Apps you can launch directly on the website (Photos, Numbers, Keynote, etc..).
You'll want to launch the iCloud Drive app, and once in it you should see 5 buttons on the top of the page.
The button you're looking for is the second starting from the left: the Upload button.
It will pop up a window where you can browse your entire File System with, and search for the files you want to upload to your very personal iCloud Drive.
After you chose the files, it will start automatically to upload them up in the cloud. Once done, feel free to delete those files from your Mac/Computer and access them whenever you wish, directly from your iCloud Drive App, which can be found either on the website we've just talked about, or even inside your iDevice.
If you haven't activated it yet on your iDevice, simply do the following:
- Open
Settings
- go to the
iCloud
tab
- Find the
iCloud Drive
option and switch it to ON
.
You now have the App visible and accessible directly from the Home screen of your iDevice!
Note!
You're free to use iCloud as a storage solution, but I feel like you should remember by default you get 5GB for free on iCloud, if you want to upgrade your storage capacity, you'll have to pick a storage plan. At the moment there are 3 optional plans for iCloud storage:
- 50GB
- 200GB
- 1TB
The price will vary depending your location, you can check this article from the Apple Support website to find your own location's prices.
I have had bad experiences with this, although specifically in the case of multiple macs syncing the same cloned repo.
I have a couple of Macs onto which I clone a fair number of git (mostly GitHub) repos. The Macs each have a number of iCloud drive synced directories (in fact I've gone all-in and am syncing Desktop
and Documents
).
I have tried to clone into the iCloud-synced directories. However, I have been having lots of problems with this. It seems very easy to get into a condition where iCloud (not git) gets so confused that one machine effectively stops syncing, even files that have nothing to do with the cloned directories, and even if I carefully re-sync each of the two clones to the exact same state. I don't know if the problem is files under .git/
or just something like race conditions between versions of the actual repo files.
I've tried to use Apple's various iCloud logging tools under brctl but that has generally not helped.
(Most of this has been posted as a question over on the main SO site: has anyone else seen this or anything like it?)
(This is somewhat different from this question which mostly seems to care about a single Mac with iCloud drive, and I don't think users in that situation would see the same issues that I am.)
Best Answer
Yes, it's a pickle to have two competing cloud drive sync's running on the same files. You need to ensure that iCloud, Google, Dropbox, Box, etc. are not using the same locations.
iCloud sync's the Desktop and Documents folders so make sure none of the other competitor cloud drive sync folders are not located on the Mac desktop nor documents folders.
I would have the problematic user disable the Google sync and download the documents from iCloud then move them to a new folder outside the Desktop or Documents folders. Then ensure that the folder that Google uses to sync is also not in Desktop or Documents. Then enable the Google drive sync new location. Move the files into Google drive sync folder and let them sync back to Google. That should fix the problem once the other users sync them back down from Google.
If more than one user has turned on the iCloud Desktop & Documents sync feature they need to do the same thing. Except now someone has to figure out what's new versus old in regards to the files that have moved into individual iClouds over a period of time. So if that is the case, ouch... That's painful if it's a lot of files.
Decide on a single cloud solution and stick to it. Do not mix your cloud solutions. This sounds like an accident. So hopefully it was just one user who did this.
Check the Google drive that's on the Google Cloud see if the files were all replaced with .cloud links. If so then the master copy should be on that one users personal iCloud.
Once you've resolved the Google mess. Then the user can either continue to use iCloud or they can turn off the Optimize feature, download all their files (if they have enough local storage) and then they can turn off the iCloud Desktop & Documents feature if they really don't want to use it. Otherwise they need to keep other cloud systems outside the Desktop and Document folders.