I am setting up my home Macs, both High Sierra, (a 5'1 flashed late '09 Mac Pro with a 256 GB SSD and a late '16 MacBook Pro with 512GB SSD) to work together for my photography. I figure I can spare 50GB on both drives for working files which should be immediately accessible from both Macs. Can I set them up with optimized storage on the same iCloud account? Will both Macs share all folders on iCloud? This is what I want; ideally both would sync with iCloud so all files would be accessible from either Mac and the latest version always accessed from wherever I opened it. Is this doable?
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Multiple Macs on one iCloud account?
- Thread starter macmesser
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Yes you can. But the only folders that will be shared and synchronised are Desktop, Documents, and iCloud Drive.
When you first set up iCloud Desktop and Documents, each Mac's Desktop and Documents folders will become folders inside your iCloud Drive. By default, each Mac's folders are kept separate, like this:
But you can merge them manually if you want, and they will stay that way.
As for saving storage space, there are two features:
When you first set up iCloud Desktop and Documents, each Mac's Desktop and Documents folders will become folders inside your iCloud Drive. By default, each Mac's folders are kept separate, like this:
But you can merge them manually if you want, and they will stay that way.
As for saving storage space, there are two features:
- Store in iCloud, which will offload infrequently accessed items in your iCloud Drive (including iCloud Desktop and Documents folders) to the cloud if you are running low on system storage. When setting up iCloud Desktop and Documents you'll be asked if you want to do this. You can change this later in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive options.
- Optimise Storage, which you mention, which removes old email attachments and iTunes downloads, etc.
Thanks. It's set up and working fine, as well as I can see. This is just what I have needed for a while and Mac OS and my new MacBook Pro have let me set it up plug and play. My Mac Pro will still be the workhorse and I'l keep new images in a shared folder on my MacBook Pro. For backup and storage I have an external drive enclosure connected to it.
Yes you can. But the only folders that will be shared and synchronised are Desktop, Documents, and iCloud Drive.
When you first set up iCloud Desktop and Documents, each Mac's Desktop and Documents folders will become folders inside your iCloud Drive. By default, each Mac's folders are kept separate, like this:
But you can merge them manually if you want, and they will stay that way.
As for saving storage space, there are two features:
- Store in iCloud, which will offload infrequently accessed items in your iCloud Drive (including iCloud Desktop and Documents folders) to the cloud if you are running low on system storage. When setting up iCloud Desktop and Documents you'll be asked if you want to do this. You can change this later in System Preferences > iCloud > iCloud Drive options.
- Optimise Storage, which you mention, which removes old email attachments and iTunes downloads, etc.