iCloud Drive

[mmkerc]

Apologize for what maybe a basic question, but I never use iCloud Drive. My brother uses iCloud Drive almost exclusively to have access to his documents on both his desktop, and laptop. It is setup in such a way that the Documents folder is on the iCloud Drive and nothing is stored locally. How do I setup a folder on his individual machines to store things locally (not to be shared between the two computers)? I assume it is something simple but I did not see how to do it after an hour of screen sharing with him. In System Preferences, Apple ID the only thing I see is when selecting iCloud Drive/options is a single check box to share desktop and document folders. Is there a way to select only certain folders, as well as to exclude the desktop?

He is running Big Sur latest version on both machines.

 

[Hunter5117]

If he wants to have both desktop and documents folders sync'd to iCloud, then just set up a folder (say "LocalDocuments" or something like that) outside of documents, ie in the root of his /users/(username)/ folder and store things there. They won't be picked up by iCloud.

You also have the "iCloud" folder which is also automatically sync'd to all machines running iCloud. I tend to use that as my primary sync'd folder, especially since the Apple apps default to that anyways, and I don't turn on syncing for Desktop and Documents. Then I can keep an old school familiar directory structure, although I have pretty much stopped storing much in any local unsync'd folders.

 

[alFR]

You can store files locally in his user folder (Macintosh HD > Users > his user name) and they won't get stored in iCloud Drive: basically it's just the contents of the Documents folder that gets synced (and anything on the desktop). There's no way to exclude the desktop from the sync that I know of.