Mastering iCloud On Your Mac: Dump iCloud As Default Save Location [OS X Tips]

By

NoMoreiCloud

These days, Text Edit, Apple’s basic text editing program, uses iCloud as the default location for saving files. Which is all very fine and dandy, but what if you don’t want to save all your random Text Edit stuff in iCloud? Are you out of luck?

Nope, of course not! We wouldn’t even be writing this tip if you were.

There’s a simple Terminal command which will set the default to your local hard drive instead of iCloud. You can still save to iCloud, of course; it just won’t be the first place that shows up when you hit “Save” while working in Text Edit (or any other iCloud-enabled apps).

To make this desirable outcome happen, launch Terminal from your Utilities folder, itself in the Applications folder. Once Terminal launches, type or paste the following command in:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Now, when you go to save a file in Text Edit or other iCloud-enabled apps, the default will be on your local Mac, instead of iCloud. I set my destination to the Documents folder. You can still save to iCloud, of course, just click on the popup menu and choose iCloud as your save location, as per usual.

If you find yourself wanting to save stuff to iCloud more easily, again, and want to turn things back to the way they were, simply type or paste the below command into a Terminal session. Easy!

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true

Now it’ll all be back to iCloud as normal. Hooray! You can thank us later, or in the comments below.

Source: Macworld Hints

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