That comes with some risks, but that’s why I’m here. As a responsible reviewer, I need to use all the features of a new operating system. So something bad happened when I was working on my review of macOS Sierra. And if the system can truly differentiate between files you need and files you don’t. And if it turns out you need it, you can get it back. Scary, right? But again, if everything’s working perfectly, you’ve just granted that tiny SSD on your MacBook an extra few hundreds of gigabytes of storage, because it can offload your old junk to the cloud. When a file is removed, it’s gone from your hard drive, but it lives on in the cloud, and can be downloaded again by clicking an icon in the Finder or when it’s demanded by an application. Apple prioritizes your files so that things you’ve accessed recently will be kept around, but items you haven’t accessed for a long time can be removed.
Optimize Mac Storage is a feature that defines files that have been uploaded to iCloud as purgeable, more or less. (You can turn it off in the iCloud Drive section of the iCloud Preference Pane, and probably should, for now.) When you turn on syncing of the Desktop and Document folders, the Optimize Mac Storage feature is turned on.
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They’ll still be present on your Mac, safe and sound, but syncing will stop until you free up or purchase more iCloud space.) The trouble with optimizing iCloud storageĬombine the concept of purgeable space and the ability to sync more files with iCloud and you get a third key feature of macOS Sierra.
(Later, if your folders surpass the amount of space available on iCloud, you’ll get an alert and your files will stop syncing with iCloud. If you decline, Apple won’t let you enable this feature. If you don’t have enough free iCloud space to sync your Desktop and Documents folders, Apple will offer you the exciting opportunity to buy more. As a result, I was able to sync everything in my Desktop folder-even huge audio files-to iCloud without difficulty. Even better would be to give the user a few options when they turn on Desktop and Documents syncing on a different Mac-keep the two Desktops separate, merge them together, or set either one of the Macs as the “real desktop.” But right now, the first Mac wins and the next Mac stuffs its files into a subfolder and waits for the user to sort it out.īecause I wrote a book about Photos, I bought a huge amount of iCloud space to sync my entire Photos library. The right thing to do is probably to generate a warning for users, and maybe leave that folder open in a Finder window. However, if you look around, you’ll probably see that “Desktop – Your System Name” folder, and all your files should be in there.Īpparently Apple didn’t anticipate this moment of terror, though it should’ve seen it coming. If you keep your key files on your Desktop, it can be terrifying. Maybe a few new files from your other Mac appear. What this looks like in the Finder: All your files disappear off of your desktop. (The same thing happens with your Documents folder.) If your Mac discovers that another Mac is already syncing its Desktop to your iCloud Drive, Sierra will create new folder called “Desktop – Your System Name” inside the Desktop folder within iCloud, and move your files inside.
However, the act of turning it on can be terrifying, especially if you’ve already turned it on while using a different Mac. ICloud syncing is pretty robust, and once I got up and running with this feature, it worked as advertised. (Except when there are bugs-a few of my apps seemed to get confused when those folders changed locations.) If you turn this feature on, your Desktop and Documents folders are really moved inside iCloud Drive, with the old locations linked to your home folder so that everything behaves more or less normally.
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In reality, that’s not quite what’s going on-when you first install Sierra, you’re asked if you want to sync your Desktop and Documents folders with iCloud. In Sierra, iCloud Drive finally gets to break out of its own protected folder and into the system at large. Syncing Documents and Desktop to iCloud Drive Let’s take a much closer look at what’s going on with syncing and optimizing, including the bugs, the missed opportunities, and the workarounds. I like what Apple’s going for, but both of these features have problems, and some of them bit me when I was writing my review of Sierra. In addition, Apple has extended support for iCloud Drive to optionally include your Desktop and Documents folder, and mixed those two approaches together to create a third feature, called Optimize Mac Storage. So many of macOS Sierra’s new features are about freeing up space from our fast-but-tiny solid-state drives.
Syncing feeling: iCloud Drive in macOS Sierraĭocuments and Desktop, nestled into iCloud.
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