Pinning iCloud Drive in Sequoia
The reason for this bizarre and annoying interface is the way that pinning is implemented.
When you pin files individually or in groups of up to ten, each file gains its own pinning extended attribute, of
com.apple.fileprovider.pinned. But when you pin a folder, only that folder gains the extended attribute, none of the files or folders within it. The whole folder and the paths within it are designated as being pinned. And, as far as I can tell from the absence of any better information in Apple’s missing documentation, there’s no single method to determine whether a file in iCloud Drive is pinned.Instead, you have to both
- look for the extended attribute attached to the file, and
- check all the folders in its path to determine if any of them has the extended attribute, which would then pin everything in their path.
Apple doesn’t document any file or URL attribute that can be used to determine whether a file or folder is pinned.
I think the design makes sense in that if I pin a folder I do want its future contents to be pinned. This is also how inclusions and exclusions for backup software generally work. But it seems that the interface could be clearer and more helpful.
Previously:
Update (2024-10-03): Howard Oakley:
If you have 100 files in a folder and want to pin 99 of them, you have to select groups of no more than 10 and pin each group, ten times.
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On macOS at least you can say that you just want everything pinned, that's the optimise storage setting. On iOS there is no similar setting, and for me that would be a much bigger deal. And yes there should be consideration given to battery/storage/data consumption, but that's all perfectly possible.
