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Comment by 36bydesign | Hacker News Reader

For iCloud Drive, we should be able to manage which files are saved locally and which aren’t. As is, documents can be manually downloaded but there’s no way to reverse it and have the given documents stored back only in the cloud (freeing up local storage). Then magically a week or more later stuff is uploaded and no longer stored locally. It feels fickle and frustrating.

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Also, for anyone thinking of using iBooks with iCloud Drive (iBooks syncing via iCloud, or whatever it's called) and importing ebooks or PDFs from iCloud Drive into iBooks, be aware that they will disappear whenever your device is low on space.

I loaded up a bunch of travel books on a 32GB iPad for an overseas trip this summer only to have them all evaporate shortly thereafter. Every time I got on decent WiFi I would redownload and reimport them from iCloud Drive. Sometimes they would stick around for a few days and sometimes they would be gone in literally hours (gone from the device, not from iCloud Drive).

Incredibly frustrating if you have big reading plans for your offline time. My understanding is that there's no way to get the books to stay put without disabling iBooks iCloud syncing and then loading or importing them the old fashion way (from Dropbox, or via iTunes etc).

This is what the App Store is for, no? There are a bunch of great ePub/pdf apps that aren’t designed by Apple.

Google Play Books is not fancy but it does work fine, is crossplatform and free.

This is what I'm waiting for to move wholesale from Dropbox to iCloud Drive, some sort of file attribute that can be sent to say "only store in cloud, keep a local stub" or "ensure always locally cached/pinned locally". Would also love to see iCloud be a Time Machine backup target.

I'm waiting for the ability to share folders.

It's been a lond time, but I read that you can add specific suffixes to folder names to control syncing.

I think it was ".nosync" and ".tmp"

Cool tip, thank you.

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/exclude-files-folders-fr...

Also "Bailiff":

"Bailiff is a simple menubar app which lets you evict iCloud files and folders from local storage, or download them when you want. Saves your Mac’s startup disk from getting cluttered with files you don’t want or use."

https://eclecticlight.co/downloads/

Not sure what kind of dumb method this is. You can't possibly change a project's folder name just because of your need.

At least if it was by creating an empty file with that name.

Also iCloud Drive's synching has been an utter mess and I gave up after nothing syncs at random times.

> Not sure what kind of dumb method this is

That's not very nice. I'm just trying to help and that seems to be the only thing that seems to be working.

I don't work at Apple, so...

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