Save external drive to iCloud Drive

[carlsson]

I have an internal 512 GB SSD.
I have an external 2 TB drive.
I have 2 TB iCloud Drive.

I would like all info from the external drive to use iCloud Drive as well.

As far as I have understood it's not possible to do this out of the box (which actually is really, really stupid), but I was thinking; Isn't there some kind of symbolic link function we can use for this?
Or anything else?

 

[Tech198]

If you want everything in the cloud, why can't u just upload it all ?, drag everything from external drive to iCloud drive. On the mac it u have a folder "icloud drive" so works the same as Dropbox access. Apart from filling up internal storage space, I think that's the only way. unless u want to upload from website itself.

It used to be com-apple.clouddocs folder in ~Library/Mobile Documents, but doesn't work in Sierra.

https://onur.website/blog-en/icloud-drive-directory-location/

Looks like "Mobile Documents" is the key in ~/Library, but if u place files there they do not appear in the cloud..

At one point I kinda stuffed it up after by dragging directly to icloud drive after i dragged to folder. I solved this by switching off and turning icloud dive back on in System Preferences to re-create.

You could always use "optimize storage" : https://support.apple.com/en-au/HT206996

 

[carlsson]

Thanks for the tip. However, I also want the external drive to sync to the iCloud drive, just as my Documents folder does.

This could of course be done manually, but then the point is lost, if you ask me.