Use iCloud Drive as Cloud storage but not mirror on Mac

[propower]

I wanted to take some 100GB of data and put it on iCloud Drive. In general I only need certain files from this at certain times. When I do this - MacOS makes a copy of all that data (in the System Library) and fills my 256GB internal mac drive up. Sure I can "optimize" (and have my internal drive always full) but what I really wanted was too keep my Mac drive 1/2 full so i could load video and audio to edit (20 to 40GB at a time) - then store the finished items and their source files on iCloud Drive - keeping my Mac lean and fast.

So - is there any way to simply use iCloud Drive as Cloud storage and NOT mirror everything right back to my Mac??

 

[milanwraith]

Disabling iCloud Drive in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive and then using the web interface in a browser (icloud.com) to upload/download files would work. Not sure if there's another way.

 

[fisherking]

why not just get an external drive? you can then: work faster, and back up that drive if you want; have everything at your fingertips. downloading (and, more urgently, uploading) files of that size will take far longer than working with a local drive...

 

[madmin]

Files that you have on iCloud drive are stored locally in the following folder:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/

There's a terminal command you can use to evict files from there so that they're only stored in iCloud drive, then in Finder you have an icon for downloading them again when needed. The basic command is:

$ brctl evict

first you should read man page for more details:

$ man brctl

I use a series of brctl evict commands to remove all my local iCloud drive files like this:

$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/*/
$ brctl evict ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/*/

The files will be replaced with placeholder files called something like:

.orginalFileName.andExtention.icloud

Which is what Finder will see and use to re-download them when needed.

Hope that helps...

 

[propower]

^^^^ Fascinating! Might give this a try

- I have external drives. What I like about icloud is that it shows up on my 6 devices. A simple option to let folks sync or not sync icloud folders locally is what I wish for - but thats not a built in option. The scheme above might be the ticket though...