Tuesday, March 27, 2018

Solving Problems With iCloud Drive

Howard Oakley:

Yesterday I was a bit scathing over published solutions for problems with iCloud, specifically the common problem of protracted or failed synchronisation of iCloud Drive. You dragged some files to iCloud Drive five or more minutes ago, and they still haven’t been synced to it.

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in spite of trying these, sometimes it takes up to 72 hours for iCloud to propagate new files/folders.

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I have been unable to discover any suggestions based on insights into how iCloud works, methods for establishing where the failure is or its cause (even a cryptic error number), nor more specific remedies which can be attempted. All recommendations treat iCloud and iCloud Drive as an impenetrable Black Box.

This just happened to me. I mostly use Dropbox, but I’ve been trying out iCloud Drive in a limited fashion to move PDFs from the Mac with the scanner to my iMac. It’s normally reasonably fast (though not as fast as Dropbox), but every once in a while there’s a long delay, with no obvious cause or remedy.

See also: Inside iCloud Drive: In the log in Sierra and High Sierra.

Update (2018-03-27): Brad Dougherty:

I’ve found that going to the iCloud preference pane triggers things to update sometimes.

Update (2018-03-31): Howard Oakley:

There is a clue suggested by Apple, one of the very few non-generic fixes available for such problems: “create a new document and save it [to iCloud] to see if it uploads to iCloud. If it does, see if other documents start uploading”.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Me too - wanted to get some PDFs over to the iPad a few weeks ago, and gave iCloud Drive who. After 10 minutes the little pie chart icon was stuck at about 80% for every single file I copied. They showed up on the iPad about 15 minutes later (14 minutes after they showed up in Dropbox).

[…] the cloud, either. Your Mac may not currently have a network connection, and sometimes uploads get delayed or wedged. Once in the cloud, the files are subject to beta bugs, and you have only a very limited ability to […]

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