Syncing OSX settings and preferences to iCloud
Is there a way to sync/save OSX's own settings, preferences, etc to iCloud?
I use OSX El Capitan.
In short: No, not easily.
There is no officially sanctioned or supported way to sync your preferences to any cloud service.
A longer version: Maybe, but it will be unsafe and prone to breakage.
While you might have some limited success symlinking either folders or individual files into a cloud storage provider's folder, I would advise against it.
- You cannot be sure what operating system upgrades would do to them
- You cannot be sure what happens if you accidentally remove the cloud folder and the settings are either no longer there or point to locations which are no longer valid.
- You risk leaking credentials or tokens (think non-browser cookies used for authentication) to said cloud service if things are not properly secured.
- You might - for some reason - come across the idea of syncing these files with another Mac at the same time, e.g. to keep settings synced amongst all your machines. I don't want to think about what happens when you start having multiple settings files with "conflicted copy of X-2015-04-02" or similar.
- You don't know exactly when these files get written to. If there are changes on shutdown, you'll not be able to sync those files until next start. By then, if using two Macs, you'll already have introduced conflicts.
Disclosure: I have synced some user folders myself this way, but only very specific items (e.g. my customized Sublime Text things). However, even with such limited setups I've had problems. (For example the license I own didn't get properly synced without tweaks.)
I use Mackup – it works great, and supports iCloud (as well as DropBox, Google Drive, etc.)
But I highly recommend you configure it to ONLY backup the apps/settings you want. Otherwise it can make a big mess of your system.
Read the README! Especially "Only sync one or two applications"
(Its default configuration is to backup ALL the apps it supports, which in my experience is a bad idea.)