The Finder uses a small grammar, which ensures its consistency. iCloud Drive is already an exception with evicted files, and pinning is highly inconsistent, and not designed for humans.
iCloud Drive
Pinning files and folders in iCloud Drive behaves differently, and can readily become frustrating. Behaviours explained, with an update to Cirrus to housekeep pinned files.
If you have Optimise Mac Storage enabled, pinning files you want kept locally is a valuable new feature, but has its quirks, and could get your Mac into trouble.
Step by step guide to building and installing a VM running macOS 15.0 Sequoia with Apple Account access to iCloud, and updating XProtect.
If you have Optimise Mac Storage enabled for iCloud Drive, this new feature lets you pin the files you want to be stored locally and not evicted. Full details.
macOS has an elaborate set of rules determining which types of xattr are preserve during different types of copying, including syncing to iCloud Drive. Here they are in full detail.
A brief reference to excluding items from being backed up, from Spotlight indexing their contents, and for them to be copied up to iCloud Drive.
Unless you exclude them from backups, Time Machine will back up all items in iCloud Drive as long as they’re stored locally when the backup is made.
Consider the fidelity of backup copies, the speed of a backup method, and the risk of losing the contents of that backup. And test backups by restoring samples from them.
Introduced in OS X 10.7 Lion in 2011, this feature has undergone considerable change. Although it stored versions in iCloud Drive at one time, it doesn’t now.
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