iCloud iCloud Drive sync with external drive?

[carlsson]

A friend of mine has the following setup:
• 1 Mac Studio with 500 GB storage
• 1 MacBook Pro with 256 GB storage
• 1 external 5 TB drive he works from
• 1 external 5 TB drive for backups

Now I think it’s time for him to move over to iCloud Drive, so that he has the same information on his laptop as on his Studio. But iCloud Drive doesn’t sync with external drives, so he’s still dependent on his external storage. 🤪

I know I’ve read about a solution for this somewhere, but I can’t find any clear information right now.

One thought: Is it possible to copy files directly to iCloud Drive (the one listed under Locations in Finder) without them taking up space on the local drive?

Does anyone know if there’s a safe way to make this work?

 

[sotosoul]

So basically we needs to upload a few TBs to iCloud Drive and, ideally, keep an always-available copy on one of the 5 TB disk.

Tested by me:

1. Yes, it is possible to simply upload and then remove the local copy but it has to be done in batches. So, if you have, say, 100 GB available on disk, you copy 100 GB worth of data from the external disk, wait until the upload completes, remove local copy, proceed with the next 100 GB. Eventually, both computers will have access to the data but none of them will have a fully downloaded copy to Time Machine to the backup drive.

Untested by me:

2. An alternative solution might be to simply use the external 5TB disk for the /home directory. Obviously, this would be for the Studio since the disk will have to remain connected to the computer at all times -- so no portability.

3. I'm not sure if possible but what if he played around a bit with symbolic links? I do this in order to store my Serato music library to iCloud. Experiment with something like:

ln -s "/Volumes/external_5TB/MobileDocuments" ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents

However, do this only after the data has been uploaded to iCloud via 1. and be careful because it's not officially supported. I'm not even sure it's worth the trouble...