iCloud's Mobile Documents Folder Provides Dropbox Like Syncing

A new Mac OS X Hint reveals that iCloud's Mobile Documents folder provides Dropbox like syncing capabilities.

Poking around in the ~/Library folder, you can find a 'Mobile Documents' folder that is used for syncing iWork documents. But it turns out you are not limited to iWork files if you just want to sync between Macs (i.e. no iOS use).

If you are using iCloud and have the 'Documents & Data' option selected in the preference pane, you can navigate to ~/Library/Mobile Documents. Depending on whether or not you've used iWork and synced documents to iCloud, you may or may not find folders there for each of the iWork applications (e.g. com~apple~numbers).

This doesn't really matter. What is of use is that any files put into the ~/Library/Mobile Documents folder will automatically upload to iCloud and push to any other Mac you have that is signed in to the same iCloud account and has the 'Document & Data' iCloud preference checked. Lion even notifies you of version conflicts and allows you to resolve them when you open the document.

MacStories suggests trying to sync between Macs by creating a new folder in ~/Library/Mobile Documents and placing an alias of that folder on your desktop. Make sure not to delete any of the data already found in the Mobile Documents folder or you could damage iCloud.

Read More [via MacStories]