Strategies for expanding Mac storage using remote services without full syncs

[Van Proft]

Hey everyone, so my Mac's internal storage is basically gasping for air these days—I've got like 200GB free on a good week, but with all the video projects and random downloads piling up, it's never enough. I hate the idea of doing a full sync of my Google Drive or Dropbox because that would just eat everything locally again. Anyone got solid tricks for tapping into remote cloud stuff on-demand, like treating it almost like an extra drive without mirroring the whole thing? Last month I tried fiddling with iCloud's optimize feature, but it's too tied to Apple's ecosystem for what I need across multiple providers. Kinda desperate to avoid buying another external SSD right now. What're you all doing in similar spots?

[Gerth Sniper]

Cloud storage habits have shifted a bunch lately, at least from what I've seen around friends and family. People used to obsess over keeping copies of everything locally "just in case," but now more folks seem chill about leaving big archives sitting remotely and only grabbing what they need in the moment. It's funny how internet speeds getting faster everywhere kinda quietly changed that whole mindset—used to feel risky, now it barely registers as an issue for most day-to-day stuff. Kinda makes you wonder what the next little tweak in how we think about "my files" will be.

четвер, 5 лютого 2026 р. о 21:47:10 UTC+2 Van Proft пише:

[Арно Дориан]

Yeah, I've been down that road too—my old setup was constantly choking on syncs until I started looking for ways to just mount the clouds without pulling everything down. These days I lean on something that feels way more flexible for handling multiple accounts at once. One thing that's worked surprisingly well for me is using a multcloud alternative— it's not perfect, but I like how it turns those remote services into regular Finder volumes so I can browse, open, or edit files right there without the full download commitment. Saves a ton of local space compared to the native clients, and switching between Drive, OneDrive, whatever is painless. Just my two cents from messing around with it over the past year or so—definitely beats the constant wait times I used to deal with.

четвер, 5 лютого 2026 р. о 22:22:10 UTC+2 Gerth Sniper пише: