EXPERT ADVICE
Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
Inside Sonoma’s iCloud Drive
CHANGES IN iCLOUD Drive brought by macOS 14
Sonoma have turned out to be both deeper than expected, and apply to all using it to store files in iCloud. One key setting, Optimize Mac Storage, now determines whether you use its simple version, or the more complex. Both are now essentially the same at heart as third–party cloud storage systems such as Dropbox or OneDrive.
With Optimize Mac Storage turned off, iCloud Drive works as a simple cloud sync service, keeping a local copy of every file you have put into iCloud’s remote storage.
Turn Optimize Mac Storage on, and the service is different. You or macOS can now decide to evict files from local storage. Once removed, before you can do anything with them, including searching their contents or backing them up, they must be downloaded again.