To troubleshoot a 3rd-party software issue, its lead developer/company owner (who has a beyond-stellar reputation and, despite having a number of employees, is handling my ticket personally) has asked me to move their app’s Application Support folder out of iCloud Drive.
It’s only about 3 MB (though 9000+ files).
“How long could that take?” you may ask.
Allow me to present iCloud Drive.
Last attempt fizzled out after an hour, throwing some sort of system alert. #Apple#iCloudDrive
Interesting: I noticed that iCloud Drive normalises file names to their canonical decomposition.
For instance, if you create a file on one machine with a precombined 'ä' character in its name (UTF-8: C3 A4), on another machine it will show up with an 'a' character followed by the combining diaeresis character (61 CC 88).
Surprising. Could cause problems if you use various other ways in addition to iCloud to copy files back and forth. Be careful out there.
Another iCloud Drive surprise: It apparently automatically skips Emacs backup files (with names ending in a tilde '', like "foobar.txt").
That could even be seen as counter-productive: If in some rare situation where you would need the backup file, and you also lose your local hard drive, you won't find the backup file in iCloud... But yeah, for important files you should use proper version control with a remote repo, or a real backup system anyway, etc.
That iCloud Drive also skips those universally unloved .DS_Store files is probably not surprising. But more surprising is that it seems to skip files called Thumbs.db. But sure, such files almost always surely are Windows equivalences of .DS_Store and would be pointless to sync, right? And yes, it also seems to skip files called desktop.ini.
What could be the problem when Finder keeps claiming it is uploading 200 items to iCloud Drive, some measly megabytes to go, for days. Rebooting does not help.
How reliable is iCloud Drive in general? Can one rely on it as a backup (against hardware problems, not against own stupidity), for semi-important files (not for very important ones), or has there been cases when files have verifiably just disappeared from iCloud Drive (and from local disk)?
By the way, I still see this situation. It hasn't gone away by itself. (Investigating this is how I noticed the file name canonical decomposition and skipping of Emacs backup files). #macOS#iCloud#iCloudDrive
For what it's worth, the issue is now gone. Probably the latest #macOS update (Sonoma 14.4) fixed this #iCloudDrive problem. (Let's hope it didn't "fix" it by deleting something it shouldn't have deleted...)
#TodayILearned that #macOS#Spotlight will not index #iCloud Drive documents unless they are fully downloaded—unless you are searching for keywords stored in their extended attributes.
This is a surprisingly big oversight. The more you use #iCloudDrive to store your documents (which Apple somewhat encourages you to do), the more likely you won’t be able to find them by searching for their content with Spotlight.
iCloud Drive has hit a very weird bug for me. I've used every Terminal and other solution. It stalls at a certain point—clearly a bad file or something. However, the Finder lacks good tools to pinpoint a fatal file. Does anyone know an Apple engineer I could send information to? It's clearly a combination of macOS and iCloud interaction. I can find other people with a similar problem online, but they typically solved it with one a number of techniques I've tried.
@johan@glennf A bit OT: The biggest irritating thing I've also found is files don't upload when the system is doing something CPU-intensive...and I hate that! When using #DropBox, system load doesn't stop DropBox from doing its job! Why should #iCloudDrive limit activity when system is busy! YES, #Apple, I am doing an #FFmpeg encode on my #M1! There's PLENTY of overhead for uploading to the cloud!