iCloud drive using hard drive storage?

[Nerdy Keith]

HI,

I want to save hard drive space and use iCloud Drive to store my documents, pictures etc on my iMac. I am using Yosomite; if that is relevant at all. I have the iCloud drive folder set up in my finder. I have been copying and pasting data in there, but it seems whenever I do; the hard drive storage space decreases.

I thought the entire point of iCloud was to use cloud storage and not offline storage; unless you download it from the cloud to your hard drive. Why am I losing hard drive space?

Any help you can offer or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Keith

 

[sonicrobby]

ICloud Drive is built into Yosemite. It would be similar to actually downloading the Dropbox app or box.com app to your computer. All of the cloud files become downloaded to your computer to be available for offline storage, and will therfore take up hardrive space.

The files will be in the cloud for every other device, but the iCloud Drive folder in your computer will always keep the files to be available offline. I don't know if there is a way to actually turn it off though

 

[Erphern]

HI,

I want to save hard drive space and use iCloud Drive to store my documents, pictures etc on my iMac. I am using Yosomite; if that is relevant at all. I have the iCloud drive folder set up in my finder. I have been copying and pasting data in there, but it seems whenever I do; the hard drive storage space decreases.

I thought the entire point of iCloud was to use cloud storage and not offline storage; unless you download it from the cloud to your hard drive. Why am I losing hard drive space?

Any help you can offer or suggestions would be very much appreciated.
Thanks in advance

Keith

It's not cloud storage, per se. iCloud Drive is just a way of mirroring files across devices; anything you put in iCloud Drive is copied to all your devices that share the same iCloud account and have iCloud Drive enabled.

The current situation is absolutely horrible. It doesn't scale.

Say you have, for example, five OS X computers, all of which are associated with your Apple Id and have iCloud Drive enabled. You copy 100GB to iCloud Drive from one computer. You have now consumed 100GB of storage on iCloud Drive + 500GB of local storage (plus the original 100GB).

Insane, right? iCloud Drive really, really needs more granular control.