from Hacker News

Cloudy with a Chance of Insanity: Unsticking iCloud Drive

by foliveira on 10/13/23, 9:42 PM with 23 comments

  • by timrogers on 10/13/23, 10:51 PM

    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.

  • by rsync on 10/13/23, 10:58 PM

    From the comments on the article:

    "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.

  • by tikkun on 10/13/23, 10:55 PM

    > killall bird

    As mentioned in the article this is a helpful command, I use it a couple times a week whenever iCloud syncing is stuck (sadly).

  • by Brajeshwar on 10/14/23, 3:16 AM

    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.

    1. https://notes.oinam.com/digital/

  • by LaGrange on 10/14/23, 1:18 AM

    ...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.

  • by urbandw311er on 10/14/23, 10:14 PM

    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.

  • by Roguelazer on 10/13/23, 11:47 PM

    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?

  • by rmac on 10/13/23, 11:56 PM

    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.

    good luck

  • by overtomanu on 10/14/23, 5:58 AM

  • by zer0zzz on 10/14/23, 12:40 AM

    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.

  • by upbeat_general on 10/13/23, 11:57 PM

    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.