Craft External Locations gives you the option to store your documents locally on your device, whether it’s your iPhone, iPad or Mac.
Below you can find a brief overview of how Craft External Locations work.
Benefits of using External Locations
🔒 Maximum privacy. You can choose to store your Craft documents locally on your device, so it will never sync to any cloud services or have access to the internet. Your documents will be as securely encrypted as your entire system.
📂 Full control over your data. You have full control over in which folder your documents are located, so you can access the source files of your Craft documents with all the attachments. You can create your own backups or do whatever you want with your documents without limitations.
How to Create an External Location
You can easily create a new External Location with a few clicks:
- Click on your avatar
- Select 'Settings'
- Go to the 'Advanced' menu
- Enable 'Show External Locations'
- Once enabled, the option to create an External Location will be visible in the left sidebar, in the Space Drop down:
- Create a new folder at your preferred location - this is where all your documents and assets will be saved
Using third-party sync services
On macOS, you have full control over where you would like to store the folder containing your Craft documents. The sync quality and reliability will depend on your cloud provider.
On iOS, Apple currently doesn't allow to access these third-party sync services as a location when selecting a folder to store your documents in. The only available option in this case is iCloud Drive. In case this changes in future iOS updates, we will make sure to use the latest version available.
Important notes:
- Document sharing and collaboration features are not available. In External Locations you won’t be able to share your documents easily via a Secret Link and the collaboration features such as commenting and real-time cursor
- Since we don’t store any information about which folder you’re using to store your Craft documents, you have to manually re-add your folder as a space if you log out from your account or switch between devices.
- As the upload and syncing process of External Storage spaces will depend entirely on 3rd party services, we do not recommend using External spaces across different devices since it can lead to data conflicts and data loss. If you're unsure of how to use your spaces, please reach out to our support team for more information.