Pinned items

macOS Sequoia adds a new feature when iCloud Drive is operating with Optimise Mac Storage turned on: you can now  pin  items, both files and folders, to ensure they aren’t evicted from local storage. Pinning is controlled in the Finder’s contextual menu, opened using Control-click, where it’s referred to as the  Keep Downloaded  item. When that’s ticked, the selected file or folder won’t be evicted; when it’s not ticked, that item will be eligible for eviction either by the user or macOS. Use this to ensure important documents remain local storage for when you most need them.

Pinned files and folders are distinguished in the Finder by an icon showing a downward pointing arrow on a grey circle.

Because of the way that pinning is implemented, Cirrus doesn’t (yet) tell you whether items in iCloud Drive are pinned, nor give you control over them in the app. What Cirrus can do, though, is check and report how many pinned items there are, and their sizes, individual and total. This helps you keep track of where your local storage space is going, and is valuable if you pin a lot of items when your Mac has limited local storage. This is supported by a window, the  Pinned Crawler , which scans your files in iCloud Drive and reports details of all that are pinned.

Use the command  Open Pinned Crawler  in the  Window  menu to open and display this. Click on the  Scan  button, then select a folder in iCloud Drive to examine. After a brief period of scanning the contents, the window will list all those files and folders that are pinned, giving individual files sizes, and the total size and number of pinned files. To save this in text format, click on the  Save  button. You can increase or reduce the size of the text using the  Format  menu, or Command-+ and Command-– shortcuts.

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