Best Cloud File Sharing For Mac
- Erik Eckel highlights four of the best cloud-based services currently available for sharing files between multiple Apple devices.
- SugarSync is a user-friendly file sharing, cloud storage, and online backup solution that can be used to sync files, music, and photos across any device. The service also offers collaboration tools to help companies work efficiently on team projects, show links to documents via the web, and share view-only files.
- Cloud file-sharing front ends Egnyte's system is a front end for a range of private and/or public cloud infrastructures including Amazon S3, Azure, and Netapp Storage Grid.
- They offer a cloud storage, online backup and sharing service which they claim uses a ‘zero knowledge’ privacy environment. This means the client is the only one who can view all stored data.
- Best Cloud File-sharing
- Best Cloud File-sharing Program
- File Sharing Cloud Services
- Best File-sharing For Mac
iCloud Drive isn’t quite like Google Drive or Dropbox. As with most Apple digital and cloud services, it’s tied to a single identity without much in the way of sharing. iCloud Drive's sharing features seem a bit tacked on.
Macworld reader Howard writes in asking about an aspect of this. “I was hoping also to have my wife’s iCloud drive show up on my Mac’s Finder the way I do with Dropbox. I haven’t been able to get this to work.”
It’s not you, Howard. You can only mount a given iCloud Drive associated with an iCloud account on an account in macOS logged into that same iCloud account. With some previous Apple cloud storage systems, you could use the credentials (user name and password) to mount a drive without having your system logged into the same account.
Best for Mac Backup: Backblaze. OpenDrive is a cloud-based cloud storage and office suite that you can access from anywhere. SugarSync is a file-sharing, online backup and cloud storage.
You can select individual files in macOS, the iOS app, or via iCloud.com and share them. But access is solely via the web, and you can’t share folders.
Apple lets you share iCloud storage using Family Sharing, but it doesn’t provide any way to share files among those family members, either. Howard’s family bumped up their storage and has now bumped against this limit.
Dropbox is a very reasonable way to have a shared folder, the contents of which are constantly synced among those connected to the folder. One other option would be to use internet file storage via Panic’s Transmit 5, which allows several kinds of servers and cloud hosts to be mounted as Finder volumes. However, this doesn’t use sync: you’re really opening and saving files live over the internet, which can add lag unless you have a relatively fast broadband connection.
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The new dream in computing is keeping all of your files in “the cloud,” on remote servers that you can access from anywhere at any time. Apple’s cloud-based syncing and storage service, iCloud, debuted in June 2011. Still, only since the release of OS X Mountain Lion that enough applications have started to support iCloud document syncing for this feature to be useful. Working with iCloud is fairly simple, but you need to know the ground rules if you plan to start storing your documents in the cloud.
Activate Documents & Data
If you don’t have a free iCloud account, or if you’re just starting out with it, this article will give you an overview of how to set up a new iCloud account. To store documents in the cloud—no matter which application puts its files there—you also need to activate the Documents & Data setting in the iCloud pane in System Preferences, as well as in the Settings of any iOS device you plan to use (to do so, select Settings > iCloud). Once you’ve done this, any iCloud-compatible app can store files in iCloud.
Search out compatible apps
For now, only a limited number of applications can store files in iCloud. By files, I mean documents that you create, not data that an application such as Calendar stores in the cloud. On the Mac, many of Apple’s apps do support iCloud, including Preview, TextEdit, the iWork ’09 suite (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote), and GarageBand.
Third-party apps that store documents in the cloud include text editors such as iA Writer, Byword, and Smultron; the PDF editor PDFpen; the graphics editor Pixelmator; and some others. At this point, compatible programs can produce files in Microsoft Office formats, but Microsoft Office itself doesn’t support iCloud.
Note that Apple lets only apps sold through the Mac App Store use iCloud to store documents. If your favorite productivity app is only sold directly by the developer, you’re out of luck.
Save documents to the cloud
If you’re using an application that can save documents in the cloud, doing so is fairly simple. Say you’re using TextEdit. After you’ve created a new document, press Command-S, and make sure the Where menu shows iCloud. Name the file and click Save, and the document will be sent to the cloud.
Once you’ve saved a file to the cloud, you can access it from multiple devices. Say you have a desktop Mac and a laptop; you can save any files you need on the road in iCloud and access them from either computer as long as you use the same app.
Best Cloud File-sharing
Open documents saved in the cloud
To open files you’ve saved to iCloud, press Command-O in an iCloud-savvy application, then click on the iCloud button. You’ll see something like this:
Note that in the above screenshot you see a folder. To create a folder, just drag one file on top of another, as you would with icons on an iPhone or iPad. Name the folder, and it’ll be saved on iCloud.
Move existing files to the cloud
You may have a number of files on your Mac that you’d like to put in the cloud; this is straightforward. Just open a file with an application that can put documents on iCloud, choose File > Move To, then choose iCloud from the Where menu. If you want to move a file from the cloud to your Mac, click on the Where menu and find the folder where you want to place the file. If the folder where you want to move the file isn’t in the menu, choose Other from the bottom of the menu, and navigate to the location you want.
Learn to live within one app
iCloud is a great place to store files that you need to access on multiple Macs. However, there are limits, some of which may be deal-breakers. The main problem is that files are accessible only to the applications that created them. If you create a file with TextEdit, for example, you can save that file in a number of formats, such as RTF and .doc, the Microsoft Word format. However, you can't open those files with Word. In fact, you can't open those files with anything other than TextEdit, at least not from iCloud.
You can, of course, move a file from iCloud to your Mac, as I explained above, and then open it with Word, but this adds an extra step. Frankly, if you need to pass files between different applications, you’re probably better off using Dropbox.
Find files that don’t appear on iOS devices
Apple’s iWork programs—Pages, Numbers, and Keynote—have iOS equivalents that let you access files you create on your Mac on your iPad or iPhone. But, the same is not the case for, say, TextEdit or Preview.
If you save a TextEdit file in the cloud, it's in a black hole as far as iOS is concerned. When you go to your phone, for example, there’s no way you can access it—it’s in the cloud, but your iPhone doesn’t have the keys to open its container. While you can move files from the cloud to your Mac, there’s no way to do this on an iOS device. You’ll need to go back to your Mac to find your file and move it.
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Depending on what you need to do, a number of third-party text editors can help fill the iCloud gap. For instance, the text editors iA Writer and Byword both have both Mac and iOS versions. If you want to write on your Mac, and then switch to your iPad, either of these apps (along with some other text editors) will allow you to do this.
Access your iCloud files in the finder
Best Cloud File-sharing Program
While trusting your files to iCloud means trusting them to servers somewhere out in the ether, the files are also stored on your Mac. In fact, they are stored in a somewhat odd folder that seems to be permanently connected to the cloud, as long as you have Internet access.
You can see this folder from the Finder by choosing Go -> Go To Folder and then typing ~/Library/Mobile Documents/ and clicking on Go. In this folder, you’ll see a number of other folders, some oddly named, but all of which contain the names of applications.
File Sharing Cloud Services
For example, in the com~apple~TextEdit folder, you can see some of the files in the second screenshot above. If you need to access any files that are on iCloud, it’s a lot quicker to copy them from this folder than it is to open an application and move a file. You can even make a smart folder that finds all the documents in this local iCloud folder: see this hint on the Mac OS X Hints website for more.
iCloud is a great idea, and can be very useful. As long as you know what its limits are, iCloud can become an essential part of your workflow. We’d like to see more flexibility with applications, so that you could create a file in one app and then access it from another. But, for now, you just need to be aware of these limitations.