Cloud alternatives to external hard drive

Hi all

I’ve got a 2TB external hard drive (Time Capsule) and I am looking to move to cloud storage.

Backblaze and iCloud Drive don’t seem to be appropriate as I don’t have a computer that is big enough to store this data, I just need an external hard drive (that ideally I can see in Finder on my Mac) but is entirely cloud based unless I choose to download it.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

I’m not sure why you don’t think iCloud isn’t right for you. The free 5 GB is just about hard-drive-sized. Or 50 GB for a buck a month.

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Right 99ct for 50GB is cheap, thats my current plan. Maybe we get a bigger free plan with the new OS in September. For education Apple gives 200GB? for free.

I’m replacing a 2TB Time Capsule and iCloud is a syncing solution, meaning I’d need a 2TB drive to enable the solution to work, and I have a 128GB MacBook Air.

Unless I’m missing something?

I think you can drag files into iCloud in the Finder. Unless I’m missing something (which is entirely possible).

Edit: Apparently I am wrong. And right! According to this it can be done but not as easily as I described.

Edit 2; Since the above is a bit of a hack, and iCloud Drive doesn’t seem to fit your use case, perhaps Google Drive is a better fit.

Edit 3; As Matt Damon said, I’m just gonna shut up now and get in the back seat.

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Sounds like Dropbox’s SmartSync is the way to go.

Have you considered creating your own cloud? I have a Synology NAS on my local network (12 TB) which is accessible on the local network (mounted as an external drive) and remotely via Synology’s apps or in iOS Files app. It replaced my Time Capsule. There’s a wide range of Synology devices and capacity, and competitor products with similar features such as Qnap, Drobo. A NAS can optionally provide other services such as WebDAV, media server, web server (I host my private version of MediaWiki, for example).

try https://mac.eltima.com/mount-cloud-drive.html

Chris, you aren’t missing something but I don’t think your are entirely correct. Yes, I cloud drive is a syncing solution but you don’t have to have a 2TB Drive to purchase the 2TB subscription on iCloud. What I’m not sure about is what happens when you store more than on the iCloud than space you have on your computer. Having said all that, I’m still at the free tier and I only store files from iWorks on my iCloud drive.

Paul

So I think I am right in saying that iCloud shows in finder but you choose which folders to keep a local copy of so you don’t need a comparable HDD.

I could be wrong but I certainly don’t have all of my stuff from iCloud downloaded on each machine.