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Roman's notes

Backup iCloud drive with rclone

All iCloud drive data are located in ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ folder. You can easily sync them with rclone to back up hard drive connected to Mac. In my case it will be mounted to /Volumes/Backup/.

Terminal window
rclone sync ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ /Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveBackup --copy-links

If you need also backup of all deleted files (sync usually remove files that was delete from source) is there --backup-dir parameter.

Terminal window
rclone sync ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ /Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveBackup --copy-links
       --backup-dir="/Volumes/Backup/iCloudDriveArchive/$(date +%Y)/$(date +%F_%T)"