Back Up iCloud Drive and Dropbox Locally on a Mac - Bombich Software
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Where are my iCloud files? Making real local backups of your cloud storage ☁️
Mike Bombich July 28, 2026
From the Help Desk
You go looking for a file on your backup disk (a Pages document, a folder<br>from Dropbox, that scan you filed away in iCloud Drive months ago) and<br>it's nowhere to be found. The backup ran and it said it succeeded. So where<br>did the file go?
Nine times out of ten, nothing is missing. The file is on the backup disk,<br>just not where the Finder taught you to look for it. But be careful:<br>depending on your setup, it's possible the files were not fully on your<br>Mac to begin with. Let's untangle both scenarios.
TL;DR
Cloud files aren't stored where the Finder shows them — they live in<br>your hidden Library folder, so<br>you have to unhide it to<br>find them on a backup disk. Separately, any file marked "online only"<br>exists on your Mac as an empty 0-byte placeholder, and an empty<br>placeholder is all a normal backup can copy. To get the real data,<br>set up a task with<br>Cloud Storage as its source, pointed at its own<br>destination volume.
Problem one: your cloud files live in a hidden folder
The "iCloud Drive" item in the Finder's sidebar is something of an illusion, for convenience.<br>It isn't a plain folder, and the content inside it isn't laid out on disk like what you see on screen. The actual<br>data is tucked away inside<br>your hidden Library folder. An ordinary backup of your startup<br>disk copies all of it faithfully — you just have to know the trick to<br>finding it again on the backup volume.
To find cloud-hosted files on your backup disk:
Choose Computer from the Finder's Go menu
Select your backup disk, then navigate to Users > (yourname)
Press Command+Shift+Period to reveal hidden items
iCloud data lives in Library > Mobile Documents; everything else<br>(Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box) lives in Library > CloudStorage
Tired of toggling hidden files every time? Navigate to your home folder,<br>press Command+J , and check Show Library<br>Folder . Your next backup will carry that setting over, so the<br>Library folder will be visible on the backup disk too.
iCloud Drive in particular plays an extra trick on you. It looks like one tidy folder, but it's actually a collection of folders in various places. None of these is a backup problem, exactly — it's just iCloud being iCloud.
Where each cloud service actually keeps your files
What you see in the Finder<br>Where it really lives on disk
iCloud Drive files that you added yourself<br>Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs
App-specific iCloud storage (a Pages document, for example)<br>Its own folder under Library/Mobile Documents
Desktop & Documents, when iCloud syncing is turned on<br>Desktop and Documents — right where they always were
Dropbox, OneDrive, Google Drive, Box<br>Library/CloudStorage
Problem two: some of those files aren't physically there
This is the one you want to watch out for. If your cloud storage is configured to save<br>space by keeping some files "online only" — Apple's<br>Optimize Mac Storage setting, and its equivalents in<br>Dropbox and OneDrive — then those "evicted" files exist on your Mac as<br>empty 0-byte placeholders with a little cloud badge next to the name.
CCC won't copy those empty placeholders, and that's deliberate: a 0-byte<br>stand-in can't be meaningfully restored from a backup disk, so copying it<br>would only give you a false sense of security. The real data is still safe<br>in the cloud, of course. But "safe in the cloud" and "safe on a disk in my<br>house" are two different kinds of safe, and if you want the second one, CCC<br>can go get those files for you.
Setting up a dedicated cloud storage backup
Open CCC and click New Task ; name it something like<br>"Local Backup of Cloud Storage"
Click the Source selector and choose Cloud Storage
Click the Destination selector and choose a backup volume — if you're<br>reusing the disk that already holds your startup disk backup, add a<br>separate volume for it in the Backup Volume Setup Assistant
Click the Automation selector to put the task on a schedule, or click<br>Start to run it right away
Choosing Cloud Storage as the source automatically turns on<br>Temporarily download cloud-only files to make a local<br>backup in Advanced Settings. With that enabled, CCC downloads the<br>cloud-only files that need to be added to (or updated on) the backup, copies<br>them, then evicts them again to reclaim the space — capping itself at<br>roughly 100 files or 2GB of temporarily-downloaded content at a time so it<br>never fills up your startup disk on the way through.
Why we recommend a separate volume
CCC normally works from a read-only snapshot of your source, which keeps a<br>backup stable and internally consistent even while files are actively<br>changing underneath it. Downloading cloud-only content breaks that model:<br>to pull those files down, CCC has to write to your live, read/write startup<br>disk. That's a perfectly reasonable tradeoff for a task scoped...