Ableton Forum

So I use Ableton live 10. My Mac is constantly syncing to iCloud Drive which I don’t want it to. It’s slowing down the production process in Ableton, making it constantly freeze and slow down. The solution would be to stop iCloud from syncing, but once I do that. It creates some kind of archive folder for all of my desktops and documents. That would be fine, but once I open Ableton - it now says “media files are missing” and the majority of my projects are gone, samples. This happened once before. And I had to manually click on every file I needed and re download everything from iCloud Drive. Essentially reinstalling all of my samples. I’m trying to prevent this from happening so is there anyway I can have iCloud stop syncing without changing anything on my computer in regards to Ableton?

Nurkomusic wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 06, 2019 5:31 am

So I use Ableton live 10. My Mac is constantly syncing to iCloud Drive which I don’t want it to. It’s slowing down the production process in Ableton, making it constantly freeze and slow down. The solution would be to stop iCloud from syncing, but once I do that. It creates some kind of archive folder for all of my desktops and documents. That would be fine, but once I open Ableton - it now says “media files are missing” and the majority of my projects are gone, samples. This happened once before. And I had to manually click on every file I needed and re download everything from iCloud Drive. Essentially reinstalling all of my samples. I’m trying to prevent this from happening so is there anyway I can have iCloud stop syncing without changing anything on my computer in regards to Ableton?

wow, that sounds extremely annoying. So I use Live 9(haven't upgraded to 10 yet) and I also use iCloud, but I never back up my desktop and anything thats unnecessary. I save all of my Ableton arrangements on an external SSD drive, which I think would allow you to bypass anything thats going on with your I cloud back up, also theres a Collect all and save under FILE which will automatically save all your samples into the arrangement folder, they will no longer be missing, or at least shouldn't be

you can also change your temp folder under preferences/file folder, but not sure if you can I use an external drive for that, haven't tried it

EDIT: Do you like syncing everything to iCloud? not sure if thats a priority for you but it's really simple I believe to only choose what you want to sync or back up, unless you have to back up everything all the time, that definitely could cause some problems, but using an external drive and collect all and save might solve your problem

Nurkomusic wrote: ↑

Wed Mar 06, 2019 5:31 am

My Mac is constantly syncing to iCloud Drive which I don’t want it to.

just re-read and saw this, go to Apple icon, open system preferences, go to iCloud, right there you'll have the option of choosing what you want to sync, also click on the options bar to the right of iCloud drive and start unchecking what you don't want to sync, i.e. desktop and documents folder and so on

Hi Nurkomusic, did anything help in the end? I have the exact same question you had. I cannot seem to turn off the iCloud Drive setting, without losing all my samples in files or making them unavailable.

I'm struggling with the same issue. What a joke that is even files from external hard drive has been sent to the iCloud and all of vst on my hard drive so now everything is missing.

By default Macs seem keen on putting all sorts of stuff on the iCloud “drive”, but that can be switched off by going into Settings and deselecting what you don’t want storing in the cloud. Telling Time Machine not to use the iCloud “drive” as a backup destination also helps prevent this behaviour.

The only things that use iCloud in my setup are Notes and data from a few selected applications I want to be able to access from phone/iPad for convenience. My Time Machine backups go to a local NAS, and applications that generate large amounts of data such as audio projects or my multi-GB Lightroom libraries and RAW photos I back up myself. My external drives are all disabled in Time Machine so it doesn’t back them up at all - there’s several TB of data on them so a Time Machine backup across the LAN would take for ever and probably require a large RAID array to get enough capacity in a single location. I use a synchronising application (sorry, forget it’s name and I’m not at home so can’t check) to back up the external drives to other large external drives. Takes a long time for the initial backup but it’s pretty quick after that. The main thing is to remember to actually do the manual backups.

Time Machine Editor is a useful small application that enables switching off the automated hourly backups etc. and allows selecting a daily time for Time Machine backups to be run, such as when you know the Mac isn’t going to be used for anything requiring a lot of resources.

If you want to exclude files use a folder with the .nosync extension.

I have created a folder called AV.nosync in my documents. Everything I put in there (also other folders) is not going to be synced with / uploaded to iCloud.

You can see it works because finder will show a crossed out cloud icon next to the name.