Is it safe to save in a folder created inside iCloud Drive?

Dorico
1

Hi,

Is there any possible issue with saving Dorico files in a dedicated folder created inside my iCloud Drive folder on Mac?

I do it in order to always automatically see my files both on my laptop and desktop. I don’t use Dorico for iPad so I’m not concerned about that side of things, I am strictly working on two Macs.

Thanks and best!

-m

2

I’ve been basically living in iCloud for the past couple of months. I have my personal MacBook, school MacBook, and Mac Studio, and we are sort of in-between houses with a house we are trying to sell, temporary corporate housing in an apt, and a house we are trying to close on. I must say, iCloud is working much more seamlessly then when I’ve tried living in Dropbox in the past. I haven’t run into any issues, although I haven’t tried it on iPad recently either.

I used to always default to saving locally on physical storage, but I haven’t run into any jams just using iCloud in the past couple of months.

3

This is a question/comment. I believe you will want to turn off the option under iCloud to optimize storage? This option gives your Mac permission to not keep a local copy of everything at its discretion I think? (Thus relying completely on the cloud for some things) and might put you in a temporary bind if you lost connection, or an outage happens?

4

Thanks!

I also have actually done it for a long time and didn’t encounter issues. But I remember reading an old post by Daniel Spreadbury about it potentially being problematic, hence my question.

It would be great if the developers themselves could confirm what a best practice is in this sense so that we can have a definitive answer and follow their advice.

Thanks again!

Best

-m

5

As long as you have a good automated backup strategy, so that any file lost can be recovered (with a minimal amount of lost work since the last copy) – then it shouldn’t matter where you save things.

However, I believe that Time Machine doesn’t backup iCloud folders if you have “Optimize Mac Storage” ON. (Because not all files are guaranteed to be on your Mac until you explicitly download them.)

Also: iCloud Drive is not a backup. You can recover deleted files (for 30 days); but there’s no versions or history (outside of Apple’s own document versioning, which is largely confined to its own apps, like Pages and TextEdit); and if you overwrite a file, you’re stuck.

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