iCloud storage works very well on iOS. You don’t normally have to worry about whether items kept in the cloud have been downloaded to local storage, as iOS seems to take care of that pretty well, much of the time at least.

In macOS, that often isn’t the case. I have a MacBook Pro on which I keep Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud, as it has a relatively small SSD, and I don’t want that to get too cluttered. Connected to the same iCloud account is my desktop iMac, which sees the MacBook Pro’s Documents folder in its iCloud Drive.

The snag is that I don’t want to keep all the documents in the MacBook Pro’s Documents in local storage, and normally none of them on my iMac too. I have Optimize Mac Storage enabled on both, but macOS doesn’t manage the Documents folder in the way that I would.

It’s easy to download items from iCloud, so long as you have a good internet connection. But macOS doesn’t provide any way to reverse that – to evict items from local storage. That’s one reason why eviction and download are two of the controls included in Cirrus, my tool for managing iCloud Drive. But it’s a pain to have to open a whole app just to push some files back into the cloud.

So here’s a menubar app (or Status Bar App if you prefer), Bailiff.

It provides the same Evict and Download commands as in Cirrus. But it’s there in the menubar whenever you want it.

To evict a folder is simple: select its Evict command, then choose the folder to evict, and click on its Evict button. Done.

It even has its own small Help window.

In this first beta release, it doesn’t offer to install itself to run whenever your Mac starts up (that turns out to be an annoyingly complex thing to do). That is something you’ll need to do in the Users & Groups pane, if you wish. That and everything else about Bailiff is detailed in its PDF documentation. It should run fine on El Capitan, Sierra, and High Sierra, with any iCloud Drive account.

Bailiff version 1.0b2 is available from here: bailiff10b2
and in Downloads above.

I hope that you find it as useful as I do.