[Easiest] How to Make iCloud Drive Only Sync Certain Folders

Quick Search:

• User Case: Is It Possible to Sync Just Specific Folders with iCloud Drive
• How to Make iCloud Drive Only Sync Certain Folders on Mac
• How to Stop iCloud Drive Only Syncing Certain Folders
• Bonus Tip 1: How to Sync iCloud with OneDrive
• Bonus Tip 2: How to Manage Multiple Clouds Efficiently
• Conclusion

User Case: Is It Possible to Sync Just Specific Folders with iCloud Drive

“I'm coming from Google Drive, where I have a little over 200GB of data stored. I want to migrate that data to iCloud Drive, and start using it pretty much exclusively. The problem is, I don't have that much storage capacity left on my machine.

Right now, with Google Drive, I sync about 100GB of data with my main machine; while the rest just sits on Google Drive to be accessed by my other machines or to serve as a backup. Can I do this with iCloud Drive? I want the majority of my data to sit on iCloud, only to be downloaded locally as needed. So, how to make iCloud Drive only sync certain folders? I don't want to sync everything.”

iCloud is a brilliant cloud service for Apple users, which is natively built in Apple products, such as iPhones, Macs, iPads, and so on. However, due to 5GB of free storage space, most users don’t want to sync everything on their Mac. Instead, they only want to sync specific files and folders to iCloud.

So, how can you achieve it? The following content gives you step-by-step operations to sync certain folders to iCloud. If you are interested, keep reading then.

How to Make iCloud Drive Only Sync Certain Folders on Mac

You can make iCloud selective sync on your Mac easily. After setting, only the selected folders will be synced to iCloud successfully. And now, you can follow the operations below to learn how to deliver this goal:

Step 1: Go to your System Preferences on your Mac and tap the Apple ID tab.

Step 2: Head to iCloud > iCloud Drive, and press the Options button next to it.

Step 3: Now, you can select the folders you want to sync to iCloud. Then, hit the Done button.

As you can see, if you want to sync specific folders to iCloud, only 3 steps are needed. Meanwhile, if you find the issue of “iCloud folder not syncing”, you can check the Internet connection and reset it again.

How to Stop iCloud Drive Only Syncing Certain Folders

If you want to sync all folders to iCloud Drive, you can then refer to the content below:

Step 1: Go to Preferences on your Mac and click on Apple ID.

Step 2: Head to iCloud Drive and hit the Options button.

Step 3: Now, you can tick all boxes in the next window. In this way, all folders will be synced to iCloud easily.

Bonus Tip 1: How to Sync iCloud with OneDrive

You’ve learned how to make iCloud Drive only sync certain folders. However, although iCloud is a wonderful cloud drive, it is not that useful on non-apple devices. So, if you turn to Android phones, or utilize others cloud services such as OneDrive, you may need to move data from iCloud to OneDrive. 

Anyway, there’s no service that can help you sync iCloud Drive with OneDrive directly. Thus, if you want to sync files on iCloud to OneDrive, you can download files and folders from iCloud first, and then upload them to OneDrive. Here’s what you should follow:

Step 1: Sign in to iCloud Drive with your Apple credentials on the web. Then locate the files you want to sync. 
Step 2: Download the files you want to sync on iCloud Drive.

Step 3: If you are using Windows 10 or Windows 11, then OneDrive is already installed on your computer. So, there’s a OneDrive folder generated on your PC. You can directly drag and drop the downloaded files to the OneDrive folder directly.

Bonus Tip 2: How to Manage Multiple Clouds Efficiently

There are lots of files and data generated in people’s daily life, such as documents from study assignments, PDFs and shared files from teammates, etc. Hence, many people take advantage of different cloud storage services at the same time, including iCloud Drive, iCloud Photos, Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, Dropbox, MEGA, Flickr, Google Photos, etc. 

Once you use multiple cloud storage solutions at the same time, the fact whether you can manage them easily can be such as problem. For example, if you want to move files from your former Google Drive school account to the new Google Drive personal account, downloading and uploading will cost lots of time.

In this situation, you can turn to a specialized and practical cloud file manager – MultCloud. MultCloud gives you a comprehensive platform to manage different cloud services and accounts easily. By using MultCloud, you don’t need to go to the official web of each cloud to manage separately. Instead, it allows you to different clouds by only a click.

As a professional cloud storage management tool, MultCloud offers the following features:

Meanwhile, MultCloud supports many main cloud solutions in the market, including Google Drive, Google Photos, OneDrive, Dropbox, SharePoint, MEGA, Flickr, Dropbox Business, FTP, pCloud, Amazon S3, etc. Although it doesn’t support iCloud now, it will come soon.

Conclusion

You’ve learned how to make iCloud Drive only sync certain folders on your Mac. Also, you now know how to stop syncing certain folders. In addition, there’s a warm tip for you to sync iCloud files and folders to OneDrive.

On top of that, if you have multiple cloud solutions and are struggling with managing them, this post also gives you a solution – using MultCloud. This technical service not only allows you to perform basic features, but also enables you to transfer, sync and backup files across clouds.

Besides, MultCloud allows you to download files from URLs, torrent files and magnet links as well. For example, you can download directly to Google Drive.