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With the introduction of iCloud at the release of OS X Lion, Apple discontinued iDisk, which was a part of the MobileMe suite of Internet services they had been offering.

iDisk gave you a “folder in the cloud,” a place to save documents for retrieval from any Mac, anywhere. It was simple to use—it was actually a menu selection in the Finder—and eminently useful. Those of us who used iDisk really miss it.

There is a workaround—and it’s both simple and free. There exists a hidden folder called Library, which contains another folder (“Mobile Documents”) with most of the functionality of iDisk. Here’s how to access it.

Go to the Finder on your Mac. Be sure you’re signed in with your Apple ID. Now go under the Go menu and select the second-to-last menu choice, Go to Folder… (The keyboard shortcut is Shift-Command-G.)

A dialog box will pop up. Type ~/Library/ in this box, just like in this picture, and click the Go button:

The hidden Library folder will now open in a window, looking something like this:

Select the Mobile Documents folder (by clicking just once on it), then go under the File menu and choose Make Alias (the keyboard shortcut is Command-L). A folder called Mobile Documents alias will appear below the original Mobile Documents folder.

Click and drag this new folder out of the window and onto your desktop.

Now, whenever you want to copy a file to your iCloud, just drag it on top of this alias. NOTE: This space will count towards your free 5GB of iCloud storage, so use it wisely, and keep track of how much space you’ve used.

Now here’s the fascinating part: When you double-click the Mobile Documents alias folder, check out what the window calls it instead: