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Under iCloud in the Settings app, I have "Optimize Mac Storage" checked and "Desktop & Documents Folders" checked under "Apps that store documents and data in iCloud will appear here:"

enter image description here

This will cause some files in my "Documents" folder to be offloaded and replaced with a small file ending in ".icloud". I can download them by clicking on the cloud icon in the detail view in the Finder. I can also use "find" from the command line to show which files have been offloaded, eg "find . -name *.icloud | more".

Is there a command line way to cause these files to be downloaded, either by file or directory?

edt11x
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4 Answers4

24

Scott Garret and Allan’s answer above is very close.

In the terminal, however, each *.icloud file is prefixed with a . when NOT downloaded.

For example, a directory called foo with optimised (i.e., offloaded to icloud) files a.txt and b.txt will look like this

$ cd foo
$ find . -name '.*icloud’
./.a.txt.icloud
./.b.txt.icloud

To resolve (i.e., download) the files from icloud, you need to pass the path to the resulting path to /usr/bin/brctl.

Thus, the following works.

find . -name '.*icloud' | perl -pe 's|(.*)/.(.*).icloud|$1/$2|s' | while read file; do brctl download "$file"; done

You can monitor the download activity as per this answer as follows :

brctl log -w --shorten

(There appears to be a bug where the full documented --wait flag isn't recognized.)

Jacob Ford
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ldeck
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18

The command you are looking for is brctl (located in /usr/bin). man brctl will tell you all you need, but basically just brctl download /path/to/filename (without the .icloud extension) and evict will purge the locally cached copy.

Allan
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Scott Garrett
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  • Really nice! I much prefer using built in utilities! Oh...and Welcome to Ask Different! – Allan Feb 18 '20 at 20:58
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    Awesome to learn about evict! It boggles my mind why they don't expose this in Finder. – mpoisot Dec 03 '20 at 18:50
  • Nevermind. I see that MacOS Catalina added this to Finder. Also it looks like evict no longer works on the command line (?). I get an Operation not supported error. – mpoisot Dec 03 '20 at 19:12
  • In case anyone's wondering, brctl download is asynchronous (just like when executed using the GUI). – Sridhar Sarnobat Aug 22 '23 at 04:44
8

To my knowledge, there is no command included that allows you to directly download an iCloud file or folder.

But since I had exactly the same problem as you, I found that it was possible to do it in Swift with the startDownloadingUbiquitousItem function.

So I wrote a really simple Swift script for downloading both folder and file. You can download it on Github: iCloud Downloader

I hope I have answered your issue.

rebatoma
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farnots
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0

I found the iCloud files were in a Mobile Documents directory. So to cut short time there, I focused the script just to that. Also fixed the issues based on comments from members above.

This is my icloudforcesync.sh file content (make sure you apply chmod +x icloudforcesync.sh to make it exeutable):

#/bin/bash

icloudDir="~/Library/Mobile Documents/"


find "${icloudDir}" -name '.icloud' | perl -pe 's|(.)/.(.*).icloud|$1/$2|s' | while read file; do brctl download "$file"; done


brctl log -w -t

Do comment if there's more improvements that can be introduced to this or if there are other better ways.

MaduKan
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