Is it safe to move my projects from "Macintosh HD" to "iCloud Drive"?

[Christian_R]

Hi!

I have a couple of question:


1) I would like to move all my projects from "Macintosh HD" to "iCloud Drive", so I always have backup in case something happens to my Mac. But will this affect the projects somehow, like will Ableton have any problems relinking to a new location etc?

I could just try and see what happens, but since the folder is 10+ GB I will ask here first

2) Is there a problem working with the project when it's constantly saving to iCloud Drive, will it be slower? My bandwidth is not super fast (upload is around 45 Mbps), but I hope it will work.

My Mac almost crashed today, so I decided to be more careful from now on.

Hope somebody can help me!

[jonljacobi]

If I were you, I'd sync them rather than move them. I have all my projects backed up to Office Online but using them from there is very slow. I keep them on a NAS box for access from different computers.

[Christian_R]

If I were you, I'd sync them rather than move them. I have all my projects backed up to Office Online but using them from there is very slow. I keep them on a NAS box for access from different computers.

Thank you for the answer! What I have done so far, is that I make a ZIP file of the project after I close the project. Then I put it in the iCloud Drive folder. I probably don't need to make a ZIP file, it's just an old habit I guess.

But do you know if I can somehow sync automatically on the Mac too? Because sometimes I forget to make a backup, so automation would be great

[TLW]

Time Machine is the built-in Mac tool for automated backups. Though it can be rather enthusiastic and you probably don't want it frantically trying to back up projects every hour while you're working on them. The free tool Time Machine Editor can be used to schedule Time Machine to e.g. run once per day at a time you usually won't be using the computer.

Smart Sync is a useful alternative or additional tool.

For a basic backup drive we use one of the Apple white combined wi-fi routers and NAS drives, but they don't make them any more . Live projects, my 1TB+ iTunes library and a huge collection of photographs and their associated Lightroom catalogues I back up to big external drives using Smart Sync.

[Tarekith]

I agree with the other posters, focus on keeping the back ups on iCloud and your working copies on the local HD. iCloud has gotten a lot faster and smoother to use over the years, but I still wouldn't want to work directly from it for anything other than documents. Especially with larger media files, where you'll just have to be transferring data constantly to get anything done.

When I finish a project, it gets zipped and backed up to two connected SSD external hard drives (for redundancy) as well as put in iCloud as a remote back up option. It's just a habit for me now, and I know I have at least three back ups should the need arise in the future.