Transferring everything to iCloud and using it as an "external" hard drive.

[Scirroco]

Good morning.
I am "helping" a friend set up a new Mac system and have run into a problem. But this is a case of the blind leading the blind - I don't think I understand how iCloud works.
He has an iMac (Intel with a 1TB Fusion Drive) that has reached the end of its useful life. He has replaced it with a Mac mini (M2 with 500GB SSD).
He has an iCloud storage plan of 2TB. There is 800GB of data on the iMac (with another 400GB of historical data on external drives).
The aim is to transfer everything - all data - from the iMac and external drives to the cloud and use the cloud as a disk drive, accessing/editing the various files from there. Syncing across all devices is not a requirement; Photos are synced and that is fine.
The iCloud Drive is set up to sync Documents/Desktop with the Mac Mini
The problem started when, setting up the Mac mini, copying folders/files to the cloud, everything seemed to be also laid down on the Mac Mini and the immediate result was that the Mac Mini SSD ran out of space, with 480GB being occupied with "System Data".
Apple Support suggested re-installing the OS (Ventura) after a full erase and starting again. They were not able to offer a plan for getting everything from the iMac to the Cloud.
I would really like to have everything done automatically, rather than dealing with individual folders/files, dragging them over to the iCloud Drive in Finder.
Can anyone offer a detailed "recipe" for doing what is required? Thank you in advance.

 

[Mike Boreham]

You need to use the "Optimise" setting, which will allow macOS to keep a signpost on the local drive pointing to the full size file in the Cloud. Settings > yournameID > iCloud > Optimise slider

It will not work quite like an external as if you want to work on a file it will have to download it and reload to iCloud, which will be slower than a directly connected external. This may not be a problem depending on type of data and how often you need to access.

Note that the "Optimise" settings allows macOS to use signposts, which doesn't mean everything will be signposts. As the words say it will keep local full size depending on free local space available.

You can also manually set any item to be on iCloud only or full size local by right click on an item and selecting "Remove Download" or "Download now".

I would have to say my own experience of iCloud Drive is not fantastic, (other aspects of iCloud work better for me). Things don't always happen quickly, and sometimes the symbols next to items don't reflect the situation. Some items get stuck, not uploading when they should.

 

[Fishrrman]

I would not depend on iCloud -- nor ANYBODY's "cloud" -- to keep my stuff safe.

Use iCloud if you wish, for its convenience.
But -- KEEP A PHYSICAL BACKUP as well, to be sure that if iCloud disappears, you'll still have "your stuff".

No, it won't be "automatic".
But it will be... real.

 

[wegster]

You need to use the "Optimise" setting, which will allow macOS to keep a signpost on the local drive pointing to the full size file in the Cloud. Settings > yournameID > iCloud > Optimise slider

It will not work quite like an external as if you want to work on a file it will have to download it and reload to iCloud, which will be slower than a directly connected external. This may not be a problem depending on type of data and how often you need to access.

Note that the "Optimise" settings allows macOS to use signposts, which doesn't mean everything will be signposts. As the words say it will keep local full size depending on free local space available.

You can also manually set any item to be on iCloud only or full size local by right click on an item and selecting "Remove Download" or "Download now".

I would have to say my own experience of iCloud Drive is not fantastic, (other aspects of iCloud work better for me). Things don't always happen quickly, and sometimes the symbols next to items don't reflect the situation. Some items get stuck, not uploading when they should.

Similar experience to your last paragraph. I use it/keep it mounted, and do run daily selective automated backups to my iCloud Drive, which generally works, but performance is mediocre and had numerous issues when attempting to use it for large data migration across systems. In short, it's less reliable vs e.g. Google Drive or OneDrive in my experience.

Having said that, it's probably ok-ish for typical lower-usage workflows, e.g. occasionally creating or editing a document, presentation, etc. Probably.

Good callout on optimize - I've had it enabled for so long I entirely forgot about its existence, but critical for sane performance.

 

[sgtaylor5]

I’m going to differ here, and say that one should not use the optimize setting nor even use iCloud in this instance. The OP‘s friend has got too much data to store in the cloud.

What I would do is get a 2 to 4 TB portable hard drive, not a backup drive, but a portable hard drive. If the original iMac internal drive is still ok, copy the data to the portable hard drive.

I’ll tell you a story that recently happened to me: I was backing up data from a Windows 11 machine that wouldn’t boot with the plan of restoring said data on the new installation. Office 365 had been installed on the old installation and because Microsoft provides a terabyte of OneDrive space with Office365 and hard drives on most SSDs aren’t that large, not all the data is going to be copyable to the internal hard drive.

So what they do is akin to what iCloud does is they have an optimize setting. What that means is you have a zero-byte pointer to the file in OneDrive but the file doesn’t really exist on the hard drive. When you open the file to use it, it downloads.

When I was copying everything back, I forgot to uncheck the boxes for photos in my backup program. This meant I overwrote 2000 of his OneDrive photos with zero byte pointers. Which all dutifully backed up.

Fortunately, OneDrive has version control. Unfortunately, its version control only works for individual files! There’s no batch mode!! It took me two days of work on a dual core Celeron desktop with four GB of RAM to restore all of those files.

Lesson learned!!!

Don’t trust cloud storage as the only place for your data.

 

[Mike Boreham]

Don’t trust cloud storage as the only place for your data.

I strongly agree with your last line! And also dont treat iCloud, Onedrive, Dropbox etc as backups. Always have a local backup of full size files.

The OP can still do want they want using “optimize” feature, by making local full size backup on an external using Carbon Copy Cloner which will now temporarily download and backup iCloud only files and then evict them. Details here. Chronosync will do the same.

I have no personal experience of doing this with either app (as I don't use Optimize) though have high regard for both apps.