Can I back up an external drive to the iCloud?

Hi. I have an external Seagate 2TB drive with my faily home movies saved onto it.

Can I copy this into iCloud?

My iMac is quite old, running OS Catalina 10.16.7

iMac 21.5″, macOS 10.15

Posted on Aug 10, 2025 03:10 AM

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Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Aug 10, 2025 09:25 AM

What mulberry58 was saying is that iCloud isn't the best choice of places to "store" something. iCloud's purpose is to make it easy to change files from any device or any computer.


If that's what you want, rather than an actual backup, then you would need to drag the contents of your 1TB drive into the iCloud Drive on your Mac. iCloud Drive at iCloud.com is a copy of that iCloud Drive that's on your Mac.


All your files in iCloud Drive may not be local to your Mac all the time, so Time Machine backups may not include all of your iCloud Drive files.


This may help:

Understanding iCloud Drive - Apple Community




5 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Aug 10, 2025 09:25 AM in response to doverrog

What mulberry58 was saying is that iCloud isn't the best choice of places to "store" something. iCloud's purpose is to make it easy to change files from any device or any computer.


If that's what you want, rather than an actual backup, then you would need to drag the contents of your 1TB drive into the iCloud Drive on your Mac. iCloud Drive at iCloud.com is a copy of that iCloud Drive that's on your Mac.


All your files in iCloud Drive may not be local to your Mac all the time, so Time Machine backups may not include all of your iCloud Drive files.


This may help:

Understanding iCloud Drive - Apple Community




Aug 10, 2025 06:17 AM in response to mulberry58

Thanks mulberry58. I'm afraid I'm confused.

In TimeMachine I can see the external disk so that seems to be backing up ok.

However in iCloud my iCloud Drive doesn't show the external hard disk with the videos on it. So presumably I can't view the videos on the external disk via iCloud?

The external disk is 1TB.

Would I have to copy across each individual file (video) into iCloud to store a copy there so that the video can be viewed from the iCloud?


Can I back up an external drive to the iCloud?

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