Sync Additional Folders with iCloud Drive

 Sun Oct 25, 2020, last updated Thu Mar 24, 2022 -  Jim Deibele

As the kids are getting older, 2 out of the 3 have switched to MacBooks from Chromebooks.   That makes 4 out of the 5 of us pretty firmly in the Apple eco system.   And after switching from Picassa to iPhoto to Aperture to Google Photos to (Apple) Photos, I’ve decided that’s going to be my last switch.  I’m going to keep my personal photo archive backed up to iCloud.

A few years ago, iCloud was not as stable as it is now.   But it now seems  as stable as its major competitors Dropbox   and Google Drive    and we’re already using it to back up our various Macs, iPhones, and iPads.   

By default, iCloud will sync your Desktop and Documents folders.  Plus any other directories devoted to apps, like Pages or Numbers.   

I found an article   on how to put your ~/Downloads folder into an area where it should get sync’d. I tried it and it seemed to work fine. And it probably will. After all, there are many 3rd-party apps that do the same thing.

However, I agreed with the instructions   on not linking a directory directly into ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ because it’s not an official Apple method. Something Bad could happen down the road. Instead PhillipHolmes   shows how to move your current Downloads folder into ~/Documents and then make a symbolic link from ~/Documents/Downloads to ~/Downloads. So that’s what I did.