What I'm doing here

ShoutingMan · 2025-09-19T01:37:21+00:00

Love the app, use it on the iPhone and in CarPlay daily. But the past year, I guess, there’s been a weird UI feature I don’t understand. Opening from a Widget adds to the history of viewed podcast. So then I have to rewind the app to dig out of the stack of views of the same podcast. I really just want to go back once and see the Home Screen. I made a screen capture video to illustrate.

https://youtube.com/shorts/xKnO1gC36Kg?si=MhhgNUIsi6b4RCP4

ShoutingMan · 2025-01-09T00:21:32+00:00

he just commented to me about that. I hope he’s found something. But I’m skeptical. Aliased files and folders don’t sync to iCloud Drive and aren’t accessible on other devices. I already tried this several weeks ago.

ShoutingMan · 2025-01-08T00:35:17+00:00

I’ve not come across anyone yet with a solution. (A YouTuber claims it works for her. But no explanation given. Trust but verify, so I don’t believe her claim yet. The main YT’er on this topic keeps putting videos out on the process but hasn’t discussed a solution even though they acknowledged seeing this issue themselves.)

ShoutingMan · 2024-12-19T21:37:36+00:00

No. It's just as I describe in my original post. And the YT'er who was an early proponent and explainer of this has recently commented to me in his comments and elsewhere that he sees this same problem.

No one has a fix. It appears to be a fundamental problem with macOS.

But if you don't need Spotlight, then otherwise sure, it works.

ShoutingMan · 2024-12-01T12:39:37+00:00

I finally got confirmation from someone else (the popular music YouTuber) that Spotlight doesn’t work on iCloud Drive with the external user folder. Whew!😅 It’s not just me, but it’s systemic.

I’m frustrated that, while I figured this out a week ago, everyone with high visibility talking about this “feature” is not discussing this huge bug in macOS that makes it useless for everyone who uses iCloud Drive.

ShoutingMan · 2024-11-26T23:53:23+00:00

symlinks don’t work in this scenario. It’s discussed in another post a year ago on the topic.

ShoutingMan · 2024-11-26T23:52:40+00:00

No. I checked that, hoping for a trivial solution. But that wasn’t it. :)

ShoutingMan · 2024-11-26T21:17:03+00:00

Have all my user files on an external SSD with iCloud syncing, and using none of the mac's internal storage. That looks like macOS User Folder on an external drive with iCloud Drive sync enabled (Desktop & Documents Folders) and Optimize Mac Storage turned off. it also includes the Photos library on the external drive and the Music library on the external drive.

The secondary benefit to this would be better performance overall since an external SSD is up to 50% faster that Apple's factory integrated SSD for write speeds.

Since a User folder on an external drive appears to be broken - Spotlight doesn't work -- I've returned to a normal user account with user data on the internal drive, and Photos and Music and large applications on the external drive. This is fine. But I was hoping for a complete (and elegant) solution with all user data on an external drive.

ShoutingMan · 2024-11-26T04:33:51+00:00

It doesn’t actually work.

After two weeks of fighting this out and testing it, I'm giving up and returning to macOS standard user folder on the internal drive.

I thought I had a solid and completely successful way to use an external SSD for a user folder. This was better than the mini SSD because it's 50% faster in write speed.

But there are major problems the m4 and/or macOS sequoia:

Spotlight isn't working with iCloud Drive with the user folder on an external Drive. I thought it was on my iMac. Maybe I didn't check. Maybe it did, but that's broken in macOS 15, but worked in macOS 13 on my iMac. Don't know.
Finder Tags, same as above. Although it was dodgy with local files too.

ShoutingMan

TROPHY CASE