I’ve given up on using iCloud Drive, despite having Apple everything, because I find the sync so unreliable and undebuggable. I never had any issues like this with OneDrive or Dropbox.
Really? I have had horrible issues on OneDrive if my connection is bad. Including extremely frustrating things like reverting files to older versions and completely deleting all of my local work. Admittedly, that was ~3 years ago before I switched to GDrive.
Might be browser limitations? Firefox for instance only allows you to store 10GB of data per eTLD + 1. How would the web interface work with files greater than that?
It is believed that Apple hasn’t gotten Cloud and Social right yet. Remember they tried multiple times with Music Sharing, Find My your friends, Share directly to Twitter, Facebook, etc.
Like the author, I have Dropbox besides iCloud. However, iCloud is an Apple thing — share/backup/store settings, preferences, temporary edits/work, and share with families. If something is essential, even for Pages, Numbers, etc., I store the files in the local version synced to the cloud (Dropbox for personal/family and Google for work).
I haven’t faced the problems people keep mentioning on the Internet, so I stay cautious enough. However, it has been my pattern for a while — Own your content and use everything else as tools[1].
I manually back up Photos every month. I need to find a simple way to automate backing up the photos, contacts, etc., and keep a copy in Open formats.
iCloud is convenient and works as long as we stick to Apple’s prescribed lane. However, try to have a way to walk out if the need arises.
...so I kinda had doubts about giving up on the apple stuff and moving on towards a home server with a RAID setup coupled with off-site backup.
It's a bit more work, but not _that_ much more work, and a single weird undebuggable incident can flip the entire "amount of work" calculation on its head.
Had a similar experience myself recently with migrating the whole family over to iCloud calendar and having to import thousands of calendar events from iCal files. The process hung several times, repeatedly crashed the iCloud web client and Apple L1 support, while lovely, were out of their depth.
Logging and diagnostics were minimal and it really was a black box. Smelled very much like one poorly understood/under maintained server sat somewhere that deals with calDav for web.
I suspect that the most senior engineering teams at Apple that work on this stuff are pretty lean to say the least. Imagine a few ultra 10x guys who wrote most of the sync code base and now get hardcore salary incentives to NEVER LEAVE.
I love that they named the cloud document sync daemon `bird`; people who've been using Apple's cloud services for a while may remember that MobileMe had a "Back to my Mac" feature which worked by creating a 6to4 tunnel and running the other bird daemon (BIRD Internet Routing Daemon) to manage routing. I wonder if there are any versions of macOS that ever had to have both bird daemons running at the same time?
increasingly my mac has critical issues that are undebuggable due to apple services (family sharing, etc)
For about 3 months my mac had 1second network delays when opening any new connections, but only sometimes? The console wasn't much help as the failing services were all secret apple things with error/failures but no usable logs.
iCloud Drive is terrible and I’ve used it to store everything for years. I keep backups on Dropbox and. Backblaze because of how awful it can mess things up.
I had very similar issues culminating in losing a non-insignificant amount of data. Despite being locally stored on multiple computers, an issue with iCloud Drive caused it to be deleted off of all.
I’ve since moved all my data out of iCloud Drive (although I still use it for their other services like photos). I thought my case was just special but I’ve encountered similar issues helping friends/family.
It’s beyond me how they get away with people thinking it “just works” and how they can’t manage to make a simple cloud sync service.
timrogers|2 years ago
crazygringo|2 years ago
And then on Tuesday it all works instantaneously and perfectly.
But then Wednesday it stops entirely again.
It honestly baffles me, what possible architecture choice could explain its erratic behavior.
And it baffles me just as much that they've never fixed it.
Whereas Dropbox and Google Drive for Desktop have always worked great.
kvmet|2 years ago
rsync|2 years ago
"The issue for me was that the Safari iCloud interface would balk at files larger than 10 GB even though the iCloud handles files up to 50 GB."
Wow. Those are ridiculous limitations.
gruez|2 years ago
tikkun|2 years ago
As mentioned in the article this is a helpful command, I use it a couple times a week whenever iCloud syncing is stuck (sadly).
wetpaws|2 years ago
[deleted]
Brajeshwar|2 years ago
Like the author, I have Dropbox besides iCloud. However, iCloud is an Apple thing — share/backup/store settings, preferences, temporary edits/work, and share with families. If something is essential, even for Pages, Numbers, etc., I store the files in the local version synced to the cloud (Dropbox for personal/family and Google for work).
I haven’t faced the problems people keep mentioning on the Internet, so I stay cautious enough. However, it has been my pattern for a while — Own your content and use everything else as tools[1].
I manually back up Photos every month. I need to find a simple way to automate backing up the photos, contacts, etc., and keep a copy in Open formats.
iCloud is convenient and works as long as we stick to Apple’s prescribed lane. However, try to have a way to walk out if the need arises.
1. https://notes.oinam.com/digital/
sneak|2 years ago
The whole “Apple is bad at cloud” is a meme from a decade ago. Apple is great at the bits of cloud computing that make Apple money.
LaGrange|2 years ago
It's a bit more work, but not _that_ much more work, and a single weird undebuggable incident can flip the entire "amount of work" calculation on its head.
urbandw311er|2 years ago
Logging and diagnostics were minimal and it really was a black box. Smelled very much like one poorly understood/under maintained server sat somewhere that deals with calDav for web.
I suspect that the most senior engineering teams at Apple that work on this stuff are pretty lean to say the least. Imagine a few ultra 10x guys who wrote most of the sync code base and now get hardcore salary incentives to NEVER LEAVE.
Roguelazer|2 years ago
rmac|2 years ago
For about 3 months my mac had 1second network delays when opening any new connections, but only sometimes? The console wasn't much help as the failing services were all secret apple things with error/failures but no usable logs.
good luck
ThePowerOfFuet|2 years ago
This sounds like the primary configured DNS server was unreachable, but the secondary was reachable.
overtomanu|2 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatba...
doodledoods|2 years ago
Definitely the movie name too, and assuredly not the book which came out 30 years before. (Which the movie is based on)
zer0zzz|2 years ago
upbeat_general|2 years ago
I’ve since moved all my data out of iCloud Drive (although I still use it for their other services like photos). I thought my case was just special but I’ve encountered similar issues helping friends/family.
It’s beyond me how they get away with people thinking it “just works” and how they can’t manage to make a simple cloud sync service.