Trusting iCloud Drive
I’d be much, much happier with the weird situation where one part of the system says it’s full, while another says there is 5Gb free if I was constantly being shown error messages. In that case, it’d just be a bug with the amount of space being shown in some places, I’d know I was really out of space and I’d upgrade.
No, it’s the silent failure and the fact that a file that seems to be synced with no errors, but actually isn’t that is so troubling. Unless something really major changes, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust iCloud Drive with my critical files.
Something to consider if you’re thinking of switching from Dropbox.
Narrator: this did not end well.
Git repos stores in iCloud Drive die a horrible death if you try to actually interact with them.
I’ve tried moving a Git repo into iCloud Drive. It spun for a while, then flat out stopped syncing everything on the Mac after that. Such is a feature instead of a product, eh?
I can see my document in iCloud Drive but every time I try to recover it, I get a “Download Error”. SO UNRELIABLE.
Previously:
- iCloud Data Loss With macOS 10.15 and iOS 13 Betas
- Meet the New Dropbox
- iCloud Deletion Bugs
- iCloud Drive Stuck Uploading and Downloading Files
- Document Versions and iCloud
- iCloud Drive Breaks the macOS Command Line
- Solving Problems With iCloud Drive
- iCloud Drive Can Strip Metadata From Your Documents
- How iCloud Drive Can Break Time Machine Backups
- Replacing Dropbox With iCloud Drive
- Successful iCloud Desktop and Documents Folder Storage
- How iCloud Drive Deletes Your Files Without Warning
- iCloud Drive Splitting Folders
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I found out a week or so ago, the hard way, that a folder named "tmp" in iCloud Drive will not be synchronized to your other devices. (A folder named "Temp" is synced just fine.)
First, why the heck would you store a git repo in any kind of syncing system? The whole point of git is to provide that mechanism already. Just commit it (on a separate branch if need be) if you need to access it elsewhere.
Second, I tried to use iCloud Drive as an alternative to DropBox briefly, but I could never tell what was actually synced. I just could not trust it. So went to OneDrive, and that has been great.
@Matt I have heard of people putting their whole Git checkout in Dropbox so they can easily switch between Macs, and keep all their work in progress. No need to manage extra branches or commit things; even the staged changes sync.
In the early days I have had a few iCloud Backup that were corrupted. Really pissed me off. It was pure luck there were one a few days old on iCloud, and one in my iTunes. Things has gotten a little better, but it looks like iCloud Drive is all the same.
Seriously we need Time Capsule for iOS.
Using a git repo stored on a network drive is a bad idea to begin with. Try doing that on an NFS drive. Havoc.
Just use iCloud Drive to store and exchange documents. That's the use case. Not using it as storage for a git repo or to use as storage for Xcode projects.
