Ensure Your Important Files Are Always Downloaded

If you use iCloud Drive on your device, you’ve probably experienced the frustration of needing to access a file, only for it to take ages to download, or perhaps your signal completely drops, and it just won’t open at all. With iOS 18, there’s a new option to beat this problem. Essentially, you can choose any file and mark it as always being downloaded.

All I need to do in my folder here is long press on one of those files, and in the new options menu, I can tap on Keep Downloaded. At this point, your iPhone will download that document, video, or whatever it is onto your device, and the little white iCloud icon next to the name will turn into a grey icon instead. That means that file will always be on your device, whether you’ve got signal or not, and it won’t get offloaded to the cloud when your memory starts running low.

You can do this for files individually, of course, but also, if you tap on the name of the folder at the top of the Files app, you can mark the entire folder as something that should be kept downloaded. This really does make accessing your frequently used files much easier and much quicker than usual. And, of course, you can remove the download if you change your mind in the future.

This is just one of hundreds of new things in iOS 18 that your iPhone can do that it couldn’t do before you updated. But they’re not the big, all-singing, all-dancing features you’ve probably heard of. If you want to see what else has snuck into this update, check out my channel down below. Or, I’ve written an eBook this year called 100 QuickTips for iOS 18. I’d encourage you to check both of them out.