Mac iCloud Drive - Cloud vs Offline Storage

[sonicrobby]

Hello!

I will preface this with Im looking to buy a macbook pro, and trying to determine the storage size required. My icloud is currently 250GB of storage, and im looking to get a 128GB MBP. Now Im currently on a windows with iCloud drive installed, and everything is automatically downloaded (as far as I can tell - since everything is still available when my pc is disconnected from the internet).

My question is, how would this work on a mac where my icloud storage is under the storage of my iCloud files? Is everything just standard online and nothing actually stored on the drives? How would it work if I were in a car with no internet, would none of my files be accessible?

Thanks!

 

[Lunder89]

If you have less storage than iCloud needs to store all of your files, they won't be downloaded until you open them for directly tells it to download it.

So to stay with your example. If you are in a car, and you haven't downloaded or used the files recently, you will need some internet to get them. But, if you before leave click the download button, or you worked on the files recently, they will already be store in the internal drive.