iCloud Content Cache is Great

In my house I’ve got an old workstation that has a lot of storage available and that I thought would be the best place to fire up that iCloud cache service in System Preferences > Sharing? It used to require macOS Server, but any ol’ macOS since High Sierra can do it.

If you don’t know what the service does, it’s a clever way Apple lets you stash OS updates and iCloud user data in safely encrypted blobs on your local network. So once I pull a macOS software update from the Internet (really probably an Akamai system like Apple does) or an iOS update or my Documents folder syncs up β€”Β it can reconcile/validate/download from a local system instead of going off to the Internet and fetching yet another multi-gigabyte file.

Anyway, I checked in on it the other day just to see some idea of how useful it is and I was pretty impressed: