advice needed re MacBook and iCloud

makems

makems

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I have a MacBook with 250GB hard drive which is now full.
I have a lot of photos which take up a lot of space, but the biggest space hog on the hard drive is iCloud (110GB) which stores all my backups.
I pay Apple a monthly fee for 200GB of iCloud storage but it appears I am wasting that money because iCloud is being stored on my MacBook!
Is there a way to configure iCloud so data is actually stored "in the cloud" rather than locally?
 
Why don't you just buy an external hard drive.
 
irnbru said:
Why don't you just buy an external hard drive.
Click to expand...

good question.. .. let me explain..

iCloud storage is in addition to an external hard drive, not in place of one.. with a Mac a back-up hard drive is still recommended for Time Machine back-ups.. these can then be used to restore your Mac to an earlier point in time.. so if anything happened to the Mac you can restore without a problem. This all happens in the background without any user input..

iCould storage allows you to sync with all your Apple products, iPhone, iPad, iMac etc .. also with other family members who also have Apple accounts..

so for example..when you take a picture with the iPhone or iPad it is immediately uploaded to the iCloud and then accessible by all other devices.

So if I share an iCloud album my family, they will get a notification and can view the photo..
 
Last edited:
Perhaps I should add that we are a 100% Apple household - Macbook, ipads and iphones - so iCloud has a certain appeal.
I would be perfectly happy if there is a way of offloading iCloud to “the cloud” and thereby freeing up the disk space.
If I cant do that then I might have to look at alternatives such as Google Drive.

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makems said:
Perhaps I should add that we are a 100% Apple household - Macbook, ipads and iphones - so iCloud has a certain appeal.
I would be perfectly happy if there is a way of offloading iCloud to “the cloud” and thereby freeing up the disk space.
If I cant do that then I might have to look at alternatives such as Google Drive.
Click to expand...


Have you asked it to optimise mac storage?
 
Jim said:
Have you asked it to optimise mac storage?
Click to expand...
Yes Jim I have.
And iCloud seems to stubbornly remain on my hard drive occupying almost 50% of its capacity

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makems said:
Yes Jim I have.
And iCloud seems to stubbornly remain on my hard drive occupying almost 50% of its capacity
Click to expand...

it can take several hours to to update 125gb in iCloud so it may just be updating if you've recently done it.
 
I had icloud disabled on all our apple gear (Wife's iphone and ipad, my iphone and ipad and our imac) recently she found her phone had become full so I enabled icloud and we got into a right mess, quite a lot of the photos from her phone became duplicated even triplicated and lost the chronological order and dating that they had been stored in, this also affected photo's on my mac where some remained in order but many more just became a mess of multiple copies of the photo's, she's giving me a hard time now saying I've lost all her photo's (there all still there but in no particular order) has anyone else encountered these problems with their photo's?
 
Jim said:
Have you asked it to optimise mac storage?
Click to expand...

Ridgeway said:
it can take several hours to to update 125gb in iCloud so it may just be updating if you've recently done it.
Click to expand...

I have spent time using quicklook to see where all the disk space is being used. iCloud folder only shows 0.1GB - as most of it does appear to be held in the ether somewhere.
If I add the size of all the folders from Quicklook I should have 112GB free space but the system says I only have 10GB free so 102BG is being eaten up somewhere.
When I look at "about this mac" it shows the picture below. ie iCloud Drive using up 102GB!
So - WHERE is this iCloud storage? Its not showing up in Finder anywhere. Is there a problem with my hard disk?


Screen Shot 2018-10-31 at 11.23.32.png
 
I found an aweful lot of photo files in Documents, your document storage as shown above seems to be quite large.
 
robnchris said:
Or as Irnbru suggested buy a 2tb seagate external hard-drive, £69.99.

https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/SEAGATE-...ee181240c:m:mjCH_vlO97A4u5m7zGbPC-Q:rk:8:pf:0
Click to expand...

Why? That’s massively obsolete technology.

You’re still utterly reliant on a magnetic drive that’s likely to fail and it’s got no remote access

If you really insist on having a physical drive at least make sure it’s SSD.

Unless you keep it in a different physical location to your computer it’s pretty pointless as a primary back up though.

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makems said:
I have spent time using quicklook to see where all the disk space is being used. iCloud folder only shows 0.1GB - as most of it does appear to be held in the ether somewhere.
If I add the size of all the folders from Quicklook I should have 112GB free space but the system says I only have 10GB free so 102BG is being eaten up somewhere.
When I look at "about this mac" it shows the picture below. ie iCloud Drive using up 102GB!
So - WHERE is this iCloud storage? Its not showing up in Finder anywhere. Is there a problem with my hard disk?


View attachment 264714
Click to expand...

It’s a setting. I can’t remember exactly where it is but you can choose whether to have your iCloud content stored on your machine as well or accessed from the cloud only when required.

I can’t remember how you change it off the top of my head but I’ll have a look when I get home.
 
Go into 'settings' - 'icloud' - 'photos' then photos options menu .. you can select storage options as shown>>>

Screenshot 2018-10-31 at 12.12.40.png
 
We are a Mac based family too.I have over 55,000 photos all high resolution. I would never try and store these on the cloud I simply have well organised hard drives linked to my iMac at home. 5 tb each - one is used as a backup.
On our trips we only keep two trips worth of photos on the laptop and download from our SLR. For iPhone shots, which I love taking, I have sufficient memory to also have a couple of years of shots but usually I download to my iMac and file when I get home.
Anyhow that’s how I manage it.
 
You don't say what OS your are using. I am on High Sierra 10.13.6.
I keep my content on the iMac and iCloud, but don't see what you see in "about this Mac'.

If you go "System Preferences - iCloud - options on iCloud Drive" you see at the bottom a tick box "Optimize Mac Storage" helpful text at the side of this text box says "The full content of iCloud drive will be stored on this Mac if you have enough space. Older Documents will be stored only in the iCloud when space is needed." I have my box ticked like this but don't see iCloud drive on the hard disk? I am no expert so can't tell if this might be your problem, but every bit of info helps a little.
 
Gooney said:
I found an aweful lot of photo files in Documents, your document storage as shown above seems to be quite large.
Click to expand...
Documents includes everything such as photos, spreadsheets as well as er, documents so I would expect this to take up a good % of space as after all thats what we are using the computer for.
If 102GB wasn't being used by iCloud I wouldn't have a problem.

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pandas said:
We are a Mac based family too.I have over 55,000 photos all high resolution. I would never try and store these on the cloud I simply have well organised hard drives linked to my iMac at home. 5 tb each - one is used as a backup.
On our trips we only keep two trips worth of photos on the laptop and download from our SLR. For iPhone shots, which I love taking, I have sufficient memory to also have a couple of years of shots but usually I download to my iMac and file when I get home.
Anyhow that’s how I manage it.
Click to expand...
The vast majority of photos I keep on a 1TB shared network drive backed up to a portable 1TB drive which is kept in a fire safe.
Photos only exist on the Macbook when I unload from the camera and while they are being edited. After that they are saved as described above.
 

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