iCloud Drive With or Without Desktop & Documents Folders

The Desktop & Documents Folders feature of iCloud Drive lets you decide whether those two folders are stored only on your local Mac's hard drive, or as part of iCloud Drive and available across all of your Apple devices.



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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look at using iCloud Drive with and without the Desktop and Document's feature.
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So sometimes I see that people get a little confused over using iCloud Drive particularly when it comes to the Desktop and Document's feature. First it's important to understand what the Desktop and Documents folders are. Let's open a Finder window here. I want to go to the top computer level. Here you will see your hard drive as well as any external drives, network drives, and so on. On your hard drive you'll find a Users folder. In the Users Folder you'll find the Home folders for each user on your Mac. You may only have one. Here I've got two. This is the current one. So if I go into here this is my Home folder for my current user account. You could see in here I have a variety of different folders including some like Music, Movies, and Pictures that hold a particular type of content. For instance Pictures would hold my Photos Library. Music would hold my Music Library formerly iTunes, and Movies would hold my iMovie, perhaps my Final Cut Pro Libraries as well. You may also see Desktop and Documents in here. If you have iCloud Desktop and Documents turned Off then these two folders would be in your Home folder. Anything in your Home folder is on your local drive only. So it's on this Mac. If you have another Mac you won't find any of these files on that drive unless you manually move them there. Likewise if you have an iPhone or iPad and you look in your Files App you won't be able to access any of these files or folders on your Mac. These are strictly local on this hard drive only.
On the other hand if you go to iCloud Drive, which you can get to by clicking here or Go and then iCloud Drive. This is a completely different location. You won't find this if you start at the computer level and dig down. You could only find this by using Go, iCloud Drive or clicking iCloud Drive in the sidebar here. This will contain a bunch of folders as well. You may find folders for some apps you use. They like to create these little folders in iCloud Drive like Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. You can also create your own folders in here. So here's one I created myself. All of the folders and files here are available across all of your Macs using the same Apple ID with iCloud. In addition if you look in the Files App on your iPhone and iPad you should find all the Folders and Files here as well. If I create a new file and stick it in here then I look at my iPhone in the Files App under iCloud Drive I should find it on my iPhone as well. That's the beauty of using iCloud Drive. All the files you placed inside it will be available across all of your different devices. It syncs automatically. You don't need to do anything. Just put things in iCloud Drive and find them everywhere. Update them on one device and they are updated on all devices.
Now, the way I have it setup here I don't find Desktop and Documents in iCloud Drive. I find them in my Home folder. You also see them here under Favorites. Favorites is a customizable list of any location you want. If I want to add another folder here, like my Movies folder, I can. I can drag it over there because this is a customizable list. What you see here doesn't really tell you anything about where it is located. Whether it's in iCloud Drive or not. Just a list of favorite locations. Now if I look in System Preferences, under Apple ID, and then I go to iCloud here and then I'll see iCloud Drive. Click Options and I'll see the option here for Desktop and Documents folders. If I check that that will move those folders to iCloud Drive. So with it unchecked my Desktop and Documents folders are here in my Home folder. With it checked it will move those and they would be here in iCloud Drive. Not in the Home folder anymore.
So here's another way to look at that. You see here at the top I've got Desktop and Documents folders turned Off. I have those two folders in my local Home folder, not in iCloud Drive. At the bottom I've got Desktop and Documents folders turned On. Now Desktop and Documents are in iCloud Drive, not in my local Home folder. So let's turn this feature On here and see what happens. Turn it On and then I hide System Preferences. I can see now in iCloud Drive the Desktop and Documents have moved there as well as all of the folders and files I had in them. They are still on my Mac but now they are under iCloud Drive and my Home folder no longer has those. If I wanted to see them under Favorites I certainly could because I can customize Favorites by simply dragging something new to it. So I can put my Documents folder back under Favorites but this now goes to Documents in iCloud Drive. As matter of fact if I Command Click here I could see Documents is in iCloud Drive, not in my Home folder.
Now note I can still use my Home folder as I want. Movies, Music, and Pictures are still there. I can create my own folders, like this one here, to store things just on my local Mac in my Home folder. Likewise iCloud Drive allows me to create folders wherever I want as well. So I can create a folder here called My Folder. I can put whatever I want in there. It doesn't depend on the Desktop and Documents feature. I could put as many files as I want in iCloud Drive or my Home folder and organize them as I please.
So here at the top, for instance, I have the Desktop and Documents feature turned Off. So those are on my local Home folder. But I can create a folder called anything I want. In this case Cloud Docs. I can put files in there and those will be available across my devices. When I create a new document I can choose whether to save it in my Documents folder, which is in my local Home folder, or in this Cloud Docs folder I created. At the bottom I've got Desktop and Documents turned On. So Desktop and Documents are in iCloud Drive. But that doesn't stop me from creating something called Local Docs or any name I want in my local Home folder and then choosing whether to store something in Local Docs or in the Documents folder in iCloud Drive. It's up to me.
Now in deciding where to store things if you have your own ideas on how you want to organize things and where things should go that's fine. But if you're wondering what the best practices are it's to use your Documents folder. So whether you have it in your Home folder or in iCloud Drive your Documents folder is your go to location for storing things. When you create a new document put it in the Documents folder. You don't need to just put everything at the top level. You can create folders inside the Documents folder and arrange things as you want. These folders can have subfolders with all sorts of other subfolders inside. Just make any organizational structure you like. But if you put it all under Documents you know that everything that you've created is there in the Documents folder.
Desktop is like the Documents folder. You can create anything you want in there. But it has a special feature. If you were to create a new document, like I've created one here in TextEdit, and I'm going to save it for the first time I could save it to the Desktop. If I do not only will it appear in the Desktop folder but it will also appear on the Desktop. So the Desktop folder has a very special property where everything inside it will also appear here on your Desktop. Now this can create a lot of clutter which is why I don't like to use it. So I try to avoid using the Desktop folder at all. I don't want to see a lot of clutter. Clutter is the enemy of productivity. So I try to keep it empty. But if you have the Desktop folder in iCloud Drive then not only will this file appear on your Desktop on this Mac but if you have a second Mac logged into iCloud, with Desktop and Documents turned On, it will also appear on the Desktop of that Mac as well.
So if you're not sure where to store files and you don't have your own ideas about that then the safe things to do is always store them in your Documents folder. Have that the main place you put things. If you're not using Desktop and Documents in iCloud then put all your files, arranged in subfolders, in the Documents folder in your Home folder. If you are using Desktop and Documents with iCloud then put everything in the Documents folder in iCloud Drive. If you are unsure of which one of those to choose, well then I recommend just using iCloud Drive. This will not only make all your files available across your other Apple devices but, say, if you're Apple device breaks or gets stolen then anything you had stored in iCloud will still be there in iCloud. You could simply get a new machine and sign into iCloud and all your files would be there. Whereas if they were stored only on your local drive then you have to just rely on your backup of that drive to get to those files.
Yes, I know that iCloud Drive costs a little extra. Using iCloud Drive is one of my favorite features of the whole Apple ecosystem. Before iCloud I actually used other systems to do the same thing and it's great that it is all built into your Mac now. Not spending the $1 or $3 a month to get the extra storage space to use iCloud Drive to its fullest is kind of like buying a luxury car and then deciding not to take it on the highway. You're not going to get the most out of your Mac if you decide to avoid using this very useful feature just to save a few dollars. If you still have some questions about using the Desktop and Documents feature in iCloud Drive ask them in the comments below. Thanks for watching. Related Subjects: Finder (244 videos), iCloud (42 videos)
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