Please excuse me if this has been discussed.
I have MacStudio Ultra w 4 TB RAM and using One Drive, Box, Dropbox, etc. the Cloud Storage in ~Library is so full I can’t download mail from Xfinity / Comcast as there isn’t enough room in my Home Library.
Question: I know this was Apple’s decision but surely someone has figured a way to store these on an external drive or somewhere else so as to not fill up available RAM.
Thank you. Patrick
I think you’re confusing RAM with drive storage, but if you are filling your 4 TB drive because of the amount of files using cloud storage, there are a few things you can do.
To fill your drive, you most likely are completely syncing your Mac with your cloud services. All of the major cloud services support “selective sync” functions, where only some files or folders are synced to your local Mac, while other files are only in the cloud. This is a great way to reduce the storage footprint on your Mac. The specific steps differ on each platform, but you search the net for “selective sync” and the name of the cloud platform, you should easily find instructions.
Alternatively, some - but not all - cloud storage services do allow the use of external drives for syncing. For example, both OneDrive and Dropbox support it, provided the external drive is formatted with APFS and is encrypted. Again, you can find specific instructions for each service on the net.
If you really require local copies of files from multi-TB cloud storage systems (e.g., for backup purposes), an alternative is a full sync to a Windows or Linux system with a large drive while using selective sync on actively used files on your Mac. For example, I use a Windows system with an 8 TB drive for that purpose.
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Thank you and yes I did confuse RAM with drive.
Nevertheless, I did not know OneDrive and Dropbox support external drives as I thought Apple negated that. This will help a lot as having thousands of photos of disease (Dermatology) takes up a lot of space. I’ll look into this and I wholly appreciate your thoughts. Patrick
Initially, neither supported external drives, but by mid-2024, both platforms had added support.
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