MacOS – Sync data on external drive to iCloud

icloudmacos

I have an old iMac running macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. My internal drive was filling up, so I connected a 4 TB external drive.

On my internal drive, my Documents folder contained about 8 GB data. I created a Documents folder on the external drive and moved the contents from internal Documents folder to the external Documents folder, clearing up some space.

However, the internal Documents folder was connected to iCloud. Is it possible to connect my external Documents folder to my iCloud account? If so, how do I do this? I know I can login to my iCloud account and create a new folder and upload files to it. Problem with that is that I have many folders in my new Documents folder, and it won't allow me to upload folders so I'm looking for a way to make the whole Documents folder attached to icloud.

Best Answer

You can move the Documents folder to the external drive and create a symbolic link to Documents folder present on the external drive in your Home directory.

Follow the steps mentioned below:

  1. Move the contents of the internal Documents directory to external Documents directory.

  2. Rename the internal Documents directory. (You'll need to do it via Terminal by executing mv ~/Documents ~/Documents-old as Finder won't allow renaming.)

  3. Open Terminal and create a symbolic link to the external Documents directory in your Home directory.

    ln -s /Volumes/<EXTERNAL_DRIVE>/Documents ~/Documents

Now verify that the iCloud sync is working all-right. The old internal Documents directory (which was renamed in step 2) can be safely deleted.

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