Syncing feeling: iCloud Drive in macOS Sierra

So many of macOS Sierra’s new features are about freeing up space from our fast-but-tiny solid-state drives. In addition, Apple has extended support for iCloud Drive to optionally include your Desktop and Documents folder, and mixed those two approaches together to create a third feature, called Optimize Mac Storage.

I like what Apple’s going for, but both of these features have problems, and some of them bit me when I was writing my review of Sierra. Let’s take a much closer look at what’s going on with syncing and optimizing, including the bugs, the missed opportunities, and the workarounds.

Syncing Documents and Desktop to iCloud Drive

In Sierra, iCloud Drive finally gets to break out of its own protected folder and into the system at large.

In reality, that’s not quite what’s going on—when you first install Sierra, you’re asked if you want to sync your Desktop and Documents folders with iCloud. If you turn this feature on, your Desktop and Documents folders are really moved inside iCloud Drive, with the old locations linked to your home folder so that everything behaves more or less normally. (Except when there are bugs—a few of my apps seemed to get confused when those folders changed locations.)

iCloud syncing is pretty robust, and once I got up and running with this feature, it worked as advertised. However, the act of turning it on can be terrifying, especially if you’ve already turned it on while using a different Mac. If your Mac discovers that another Mac is already syncing its Desktop to your iCloud Drive, Sierra will create new folder called “Desktop - Your System Name” inside the Desktop folder within iCloud, and move your files inside. (The same thing happens with your Documents folder.)

What this looks like in the Finder: All your files disappear off of your desktop. Maybe a few new files from your other Mac appear. If you keep your key files on your Desktop, it can be terrifying. However, if you look around, you’ll probably see that “Desktop - Your System Name” folder, and all your files should be in there.

Apparently Apple didn’t anticipate this moment of terror, though it should’ve seen it coming. The right thing to do is probably to generate a warning for users, and maybe leave that folder open in a Finder window. Even better would be to give the user a few options when they turn on Desktop and Documents syncing on a different Mac—keep the two Desktops separate, merge them together, or set either one of the Macs as the “real desktop.” But right now, the first Mac wins and the next Mac stuffs its files into a subfolder and waits for the user to sort it out.

Because I wrote a book about Photos, I bought a huge amount of iCloud space to sync my entire Photos library. As a result, I was able to sync everything in my Desktop folder—even huge audio files—to iCloud without difficulty. If you don’t have enough free iCloud space to sync your Desktop and Documents folders, Apple will offer you the exciting opportunity to buy more. If you decline, Apple won’t let you enable this feature.

(Later, if your folders surpass the amount of space available on iCloud, you’ll get an alert and your files will stop syncing with iCloud. They’ll still be present on your Mac, safe and sound, but syncing will stop until you free up or purchase more iCloud space.)

The trouble with optimizing iCloud storage

Combine the concept of purgeable space and the ability to sync more files with iCloud and you get a third key feature of macOS Sierra. When you turn on syncing of the Desktop and Document folders, the Optimize Mac Storage feature is turned on. (You can turn it off in the iCloud Drive section of the iCloud Preference Pane, and probably should, for now.)

Optimize Mac Storage is a feature that defines files that have been uploaded to iCloud as purgeable, more or less. Apple prioritizes your files so that things you’ve accessed recently will be kept around, but items you haven’t accessed for a long time can be removed. When a file is removed, it’s gone from your hard drive, but it lives on in the cloud, and can be downloaded again by clicking an icon in the Finder or when it’s demanded by an application.

Scary, right? But again, if everything’s working perfectly, you’ve just granted that tiny SSD on your MacBook an extra few hundreds of gigabytes of storage, because it can offload your old junk to the cloud. And if it turns out you need it, you can get it back.

If everything’s working perfectly. And if the system can truly differentiate between files you need and files you don’t.

So something bad happened when I was working on my review of macOS Sierra. As a responsible reviewer, I need to use all the features of a new operating system. That comes with some risks, but that’s why I’m here. Risk (of losing data) is our business.

Here’s what happened: While I was working on a podcast-editing project in Logic Pro X, a bunch of my audio files were removed by Optimize Mac Storage. I keep all my key files and projects on the Desktop, as many people do, and since this is a feature that’s designed to keep your work in sync, I decided I was not going change my workflow one bit.

Apple has since told me that I absolutely ran into several different bugs, as well as a few quirks of the file-management process. Many apps store all of their asset files in a single package file—it’s really a folder, but all the important files are stuffed inside so that if you move the package, everything comes along for the ride. A Keynote presentation file is actually a package with a Keynote document and all of the images and movies you dragged in, all bundled together.

Optimize Mac Storage works great with packages. It’s not going to delve down inside a package and get rid of your files—old projects can be optimized away, but new products will remain on your drive, and nothing gets plucked out of the inside of projects.

The problem with some apps—and Apple’s Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X fit into this category—is that either they don’t use packages, or stuffing all your files inside a package is optional. My podcast template keeps audio files in the same folder as my Logic project files, but they don’t live inside a package.

Now, it turns out that App developers can take advantage of file-coordination APIs to designate all the files that a given project is using, even if they’re not inside a package. If Logic Pro X used those APIs, perhaps my files wouldn’t have been touched, because iCloud would recognize that they were part of an active project. Alas, not even Apple’s own apps support all of Apple’s APIs. (Optimize Mac Storage apparently looks at the last time you opened a file in the Finder as a way to help determine the age of a file, but if you open a project file and that file then reads from other files, the feature doesn’t consider them actively used.)

The setup of my project folders, Logic’s lack of support for file coordination, and the bugs that made my Mac think it was much more space constrained than it actually was—this was the situation that conspired to make Optimize Mac Storage look at a few 14-day-old 600MB audio files and decide that they were old junk.

Pro tip: Turn it off or move key files elsewhere

With any luck, Apple’s hot on the case of fixing the bugs. Perhaps the teams in charge of Apple’s pro apps are working on coordinating project files a bit more aggressively. And I suspect that I might be a little responsible for this new Apple tech note, which suggests that if you’re using a pro app, you should move your projects out of synced folders or turn off Optimize Mac Storage.

Yep, that’s Apple saying that people who use pro apps should just turn off or avoid using a major new feature of macOS Sierra. It burns a little—what’s the point of making new productivity features if some classes of Mac user just shouldn’t use them? What’s worse, it points out the larger risk in turning on Optimize Mac Storage: If you keep key files outside of a package—images you’re planning on dropping into a Keynote presentation, for example, but haven’t yet—you risk them being deleted by Optimize Mac Storage.

If your internet connection is permanent, fast and unmetered, this is no big deal. If you’re working on an airplane and discover that one of your files you were counting on is gone, welp… that sucks for you. Optimize Mac Storage offers no user interface, so there’s no way to designate certain files or folders as un-purgeable. It’s all or nothing. Either you take your chances or you walk away.

For many classes of Mac user, the risks are low and the benefits are great. For other classes, the right answer is to do what Apple recommends in its tech note: walk away.

See more macOS Sierra coverage.

By Jason Snell

October 6, 2016 11:38 AM PT

When free space isn’t free: Purgeable storage in macOS Sierra

For years, the storage inside our computers just kept increasing. But with the advent of solid-state drives, which are less prone to failure, dramatically faster, and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives, there came a tough transition. Instead of having a terabyte or two of disk space, maybe you’ve only got 250 or 500 GB. Maybe you used to never think about running out of space, and now every so often your Mac throws up that terrifying warning box that your disk is almost full.

Apple recognized this, too, and to its credit, it made this transition one of the main features of macOS Sierra. A lot of the stuff on our drives doesn’t need to be there. It either isn’t necessary (log files, used app installers, and the like), or it’s just a duplicate of something that’s stored in the cloud.

The result is a whole raft of features in macOS Sierra that are all about freeing up more space on your drive. One of the biggest changes affects about how free space is calculated and displayed.

Free space and purgeable space

macOS displays the amount of free space on your drive in a few places, including:

• If you’ve got the Status Bar turned on in the Finder (View: Show Status Bar or Command-slash), you’ll see it at the bottom of the window

• If you’ve got Finder preferences set to show hard disks on the Desktop, you can turn on Show Item Info from the View Options panel (Command-J)

• If you select your drive from the Desktop or from the Computer window (Go: Computer or Command-Shift-C) and choose Get Info (Command-I)

• You can choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab.

• In macOS Sierra, you can activate Siri and ask it how much free space you’ve got.

The Storage tab in About this Mac has been redesigned for macOS Sierra to give you more information about what’s filling your drive. The mysterious “Other” area of the storage graph is gone, and there’s much more granularity about what’s using that space, including unexpected space hogs like GarageBand and iTunes backups of iOS devices. The new Manage button, above the right edge of the graph, can help you reduce that stuff.

But if you look at the right end of the graph you’ll find two blocks: Free Space, labeled in white, and Purgeable, labeled in white with a diagonal gray pattern. In macOS Sierra, there are two different kinds of free space: Free and Purgeable.

Free space is what we’ve always known it to be. It’s space on disk where there’s nothing1, that’s ready to have data poured into it. Purgeable space is different. Purgeable space is a collection of files that are really on disk, ready to be read or modified or added to at any time—stuff like files stored in iCloud, dictionaries you haven’t used recently, certain large fonts (especially of Asian languages) that you may never or rarely use, movies and TV shows you’ve already watched (and are re-downloadable from iTunes), and photos and videos in that are synced with iCloud Photo Library (if the Optimize Mac Storage setting is turned on in Photos preferences).

These are real files, but Apple considers them expendable. They can be deleted immediately, without warning, in order to free up disk space, because they can always be downloaded again later.

Now here’s the big change in macOS Sierra: Apple adds the amount of truly free space to the amount of purgeable space, and that’s what is displayed on your Mac as the amount of free space on disk. As I write this, my boot drive has 51.3GB of free space—and 22.6GB of purgeable space. In the old days, this would be reported to me as 51.3GB free. In macOS Sierra, it’s reported as 73.9GB free.

According to Apple, if I were to try to copy a 60GB file onto my drive, it would just work. The system would work in the background to purge enough stuff to fit my file and keep a decent amount of free space on the drive so that my Mac wouldn’t slow to a crawl, which happens when your disk is nearly completely full.

Now, when I was writing my review of macOS Sierra, I ran into a few bugs on this front. My system became confused about the real amount of free space on my drive, and prevented me from performing an iOS device backup when I had plenty of space. None of my data was lost, but I was prevented from performing actions that shouldn’t have been a problem. At one point—you can see this in the screen shot at the top of my Sierra review—my Mac couldn’t decide how much free space it really had. Siri said 30GB, but the System Information app said 55GB2.

I’m confident that Apple will squash these bugs in short order. But the new concept of free space is here to stay. In an ideal world, your Mac should treat that free space as real free space, and there’s no need to peek behind the curtain. In the shorter term, there will probably be bugs and incompatibilities, and if you’re someone who cares about what’s going on behind the scenes of your Mac, you should be aware that not all free space is the same.

See more macOS Sierra coverage.

By Jason Snell

October 3, 2016 11:26 AM PT

Major macOS updates can now download in the background

If you haven’t updated to macOS Sierra yet, you might find your installation will go more quickly than you might have anticipated. That’s because Apple has made a subtle change to the way major macOS updates are sent to eligible Macs.

For a while now, macOS has featured an option to download software updates in the background. You can find the settings in the App Store panel of the System Preferences app. If you have the “Download newly available updates in the background” box checked, your Mac will do just what it says—download updates automatically, so they’re ready to install immediately.

But up to now, that setting didn’t cover major system updates like macOS Sierra. Beginning today and rolling out over the next few weeks, the full update to macOS Sierra will be available for background downloading on Macs that are compatible with the macOS Sierra update.

What this means is that if your compatible Mac running 10.11.5 or 10.11.6 alerts you that the update to macOS Sierra is available, rather than being prompted to download the (somewhat large) macOS Sierra installer, the installer will immediately launch, because it was downloaded in the background before you were alerted.

If you don’t want to update to Sierra, you can delete the installer. If you’re running short on disk space, the system will automatically delete the installer if it needs to make room for your files. What Apple has basically done is add the installers for major macOS updates to all the other software updates that download in the background so you can install them immediately rather than waiting.

To turn this feature off, you can uncheck the option to download new updates in the App Store pane. If you’ve got plenty of bandwidth and no bandwidth caps, however, allowing the system to download your apps in advance of installation can be a time saver.

By Jason Snell

September 30, 2016 10:02 AM PT

Assembling YouTube videos with Final Cut Pro

I’ve been editing video for a very long time. Since the days of wiring two VCRs together and pressing play on one and record on the other. I’m not a professional video editor and never will be, but I’ve been an amateur long enough to appreciate how far we’ve come from the days of two VCRs. (Sorry, people who grew up editing actual film—I never had the privilege.)

This year I made an effort to generate video editions of one of my podcasts, Total Party Kill. It led me down the path of using Final Cut Pro X more than I’ve ever done before. And while I know that Apple’s redesign of Final Cut made a lot of professional video editors very angry, as an amateur who needs a tool to bodge together Internet videos from a bunch of different sources, I’ve been floored at how easy it is to get the results that I want.

It starts with the timeline, into which you can dump just about anything you need—video, audio, graphics, you name it. The different levels of the timeline stack, so for visible objects (as opposed to audio files) you’re creating layers of objects that lay on top of one another.

For Total Party Kill, I need to take two different video files—video of our faces playing Dungeons and Dragons generated by Google Hangouts, and video of the map we’re playing on as captured via QuickTime Player from my web browser. In order to fit them together on a screen, I scale down the video of our faces and scale and crop the video from QuickTime Player.

The idea of scaling and cropping video seemed extremely intimidating to me, but once you figure out how to do it in Final Cut Pro X, it’s pretty easy. When you select a video in the timeline, you can click on its characteristics in the Video pane. Click the Transform tool to move and scale your video file—you can even just drag it around on the screen in the preview window. Click the Crop tool to crop your video.

The shape of our D&D maps can vary quite a bit based on the rooms that we’re exploring, so the cropping I do on my map video varies throughout the entire three-hour-long session. To make different crops at different points, I use the Blade tool in Final Cut Pro. To use the blade tool, just type the letter b, and your cursor becomes a blade, ready to split any clip in the timeline into two separate clips at the place where you click. (Type a to return to a normal cursor when you’re done.) I use the Blade tool to chop my two video files whenever I need them to change their orientation, and then move and crop them as needed.

Another cool option is duplicating your video clip and using different parts of it in different places. My Google Hangouts video features a large image of the person who’s currently talking, and a series of thumbnails of everyone’s faces at the bottom of the screen. When I want to put them in different places, I duplicate my video in the timeline and crop each copy to only display the relevant portion. You can even do this multiple times, creating a big stack of duplicate videos, all with different portions cropped out.

The shapes of my Google Hangouts video and the map capture don’t usually fit together like pieces of a puzzle, so I bring in some graphics files to fill the space (and remind people what they’re watching). A quick trip to Photoshop generated a banner version of our podcast logo that I was able to drop in and fill a bunch of black space on the screen. I also brought in a transparent PNG file of the Incomparable logo, and dropped it in the bottom-left corner of the screen and set that object to a low opacity, replicating annoying TV-network bugs. Always be branding.

That leaves audio, which is also pretty straightforward. I was able to drag in audio files of the podcast’s theme song and position those properly, drop in a large video logo at the very start of the podcast as a title card, and drop in a high-quality audio file based on every participant’s local recording of their microphone rather than the muddy version recorded by Google Hangouts.

The end result is hardly a network TV production, but it’s a lot better than any of the source material on its own. And I was able to do it in Final Cut without too much of a learning curve.