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Can I Move Large Files From An External HDD To iCloud Directly?

Hi there. I have 1TB of files on an external HDD. I want to upload them to iCloud drive (where I have 2TB of space). The only way I know of is to copy the files from external HDD to iCloud Drive on my Mac. But my Mac has only 100GB of local space, and my attempts to copy the external HDD files to iCloud Drive seems to eat up the local storage capacity of my Mac... Is there any way to "bypass" the local storage limitations of my Mac? Thanks in advance! Cheers Fab

Best Answered by

iBoysoft author Vain Rowe

Vain Rowe

Answered on Tuesday, August 5, 2025

Hi there, you cannot move large files from an external HDD to iCloud bypass Mac, as iCloud Drive is primarily a synchronization service but not offline storage. Even if you put files on a Mac and let iCloud sync them, you cannot delete them locally since they will be deleted from iCloud as well. My suggestion is to buy a hard drive for the file storage or store the files on OneDrive or another cloud storage server.

 

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