Mountain Lion – Dump iCloud as Default Save Location

One of the ‘features’ of Mountain Lion is that many apps (e.g. Preview, TextEdit and Pages) always default to save in iCloud. Annoying. Searching for a solution to correct this feature led to this tip on how to change Mountain Lion’s default save location on Mac OS X Hints. It’s a pretty simple fix, just open Terminal (type ‘Terminal’ in Spotlight) and cut-n-paste the following:

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool false

Then hit return, close Terminal, and restart your Mac. From there on out, you should no longer be defaulted to iCloud when saving documents. If you want to return to the default for iCloud, simply open terminal, cut-n-paste the following, hit return and when done, restart your Mac.

defaults write NSGlobalDomain NSDocumentSaveNewDocumentsToCloud -bool true

One thought on “Mountain Lion – Dump iCloud as Default Save Location

  1. This is a great tip to share. The default ‘save to iCloud’ option is very frustrating. Oftentimes people seem to not even notice this and your documents may be saved to iCloud when you think the document is on your hard drive. This is especially harmful if you do not have a network connection and expect to be able to pull up the document you had saved earlier.

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