iCloud Drive upload speed is very slow!

Hello everyone. I have been struggling with this for over nine months and solved it on my PC.

My problem was that I had a working iCloud drive on iPhone and Mac, but wanted to add a Windows PC and that one refused to update. The computer would only sync a few files per day (if not zero) for days and weeks. I had tried uninstalling/reinstalling but each time, it would start well for a few hours and they completely freeze.

Good news is that I solved it.

Bad news is that it is a bit technical.

Here is how I solved the situation

• About a dozen calls with Apple support with no real help except different people asking me the same questions again and again and nobody good enough to answer
• At some point the hotline suggested that I manually copy the content of the Mac to the PC (via USB or equivalent) and start the sync from there. This was a VERY STUPID MOVE as everything started to get duplicated and all files renamed with a (1) at the end on the PC side, then pushed back to the Mac (still slowly!). So DON'T DO THAT
• We uninstalled and reinstalled all sorts of versions of iClouddrive. If you are on Windows 10, I would strongly encourage to

1. 1. calmly uninstall iCloudDrive (YES you will lose all your synchronised files, so be careful)
   2. reboot
   3. make sure you have no trace of any Apple product left
   4. reinstall from the Microsoft store

• Once you have reinstalled and it starts downloading, use the following trick

1. 1. Press ctrl-shift and right-click on the iCloudDrive icon in your task bar
   2. Activate "Enable logging"
   3. Wait for an hour
   4. ctrl-shift right-click again and select "Prepare logs"
   5. This will create a big zip file on your desktop named iCWLogs-(date).zip
   6. IMPORTANT: ctrl-shift right-click one last time and disable logging.

• Open the zip file on your desktop and

1. 1. check the iCloudDrive.(date).log file (if you open in Notepad, disable wrapping for better visibility; you can also open the file in Excel)
   2. focus on lines with an ERROR message and try to fix the errors. Messages are quite explicit.
   3. In my case there were a number of files with invalid file names or too long path that were incompatible with my PC... I just renamed / moved these on the Mac and magically the sync started to perform at great speed.

I am conscious that there may be all sorts of other reasons but at least it worked in my case.

Just hoped it helped.

I'm having the exact same issue. I have 50 gigabytes I'm trying to upload to iCloud Drive and it's uploading at what looks to be 500 kb/s... I also have hi-speed internet and I've tried so many things and it's still slow. At this rate it's going to take WEEKS...

This is unacceptable, and there are TONS of users with this exact same issue and Apple is just ignoring it.

I have an internet upload speed of 253mbps and it's still zero kb uploaded for a small mb (just a file update on the icloud) after a few days. There are now 100 files that need to be updated on the cloud. What is the reason? I have recently decided to shift everything from Google to Apple and now I'm experiencing this; what's frustrating is that you need these files available across the devices (that's why you're doing this in the first place) and there's no progress at all.

Just bought a new MacBookAir with M1 chip/ Big Sur preinstalled. Upload speeds to iCloud Drive incredibly slow. My previous MacBookAir was a 2013 with Catalina and Uploading to iCloud Drive was extremely fast. Unbelievable.

Apple needs to respond to this post and serious problem. Apple apparently is deliberately throttling the upload speeds. This must stop.

Feedback for Apple goes here >>> http://www.apple.com/feedback/

Apple will not reply to this post.

Apple needs to respond to this post and serious problem. Apple apparently is deliberately throttling the upload speeds. This must stop.

In our country of Chile, we have fiber optic 400 Mbps download and 200 Mbps upload speeds with a powerful Windows computer — yet the iCloud app from the Microsoft Store ignores this extremely powerful upload speed. The max upload speed on speedtest.net has reached beyond 250 Mbps at times over gigabit ethernet.

Here is our speed on just Wi-Fi:

I also have this problem of absolutely atrocious upload speeds to iCloud Drive. Even worse is the fact that Apple support doesn't even show the simple courtesy of replying to this issue FOR A PAID SERVICE!

I have a 8.6 gB file that has been in the process of uploading for over one hour and the progress bar os at about perhaps 2%! I have no idea if the upload has stalled or what! Have tried logging out, clearing browser cache and logging back in, and the same thing happens.

I also use GOOGLE DRIVE for storage, and this exact same file only take 19 minutes to upload! Yes, that's right, 10 MINUTES!!!!!!!

My advice is to rely on Google Drive! I only am trying to use iCloud as a third backup for redundancy, but this poor performance is just unforgivable for a paid cloud storage solution!

Sorry I made a typo (and of course Apple does not give me a way to edit my post :(

My upload speed to GOOGLE DRIVE is only 10 minutes (not 19 minutes).

My advice, if you need a primary cloud storage solution, use Google Drive, not iCloud Drive.

Everything about iCloud Drive is inferior, compared to Google Drive IMO.

I have the same problem with max upload speeds of 50kb/s on my brand new Mac Mini with M1...

I did however managed to speed up the process to upload speeds up to 180kb/s, by unchecking 'Optimise Mac Storage' under Settings > Apple ID. Hope this can help anybody speed up the process a bit!

I am having the same issue. I have 225GB of data to upload (2.4M files) and I don't believe this process will ever complete in this rate. my upload speed is about 250MB (I have a fiber optic with 1GB).

I need to understand how this can be fixed ASAP.

Same issue. My piece of garbage 2017bmacbook pro with a pathetic 121 GB of storage took a dump and I had to reformat the drive and reinstall everything (I did not pick this, it was part of the deal for school). Now trying to download my backed up files from iCloud and if I am lucky I may be done in a month. What the **** apple? Do you have a freaken hamster running on a wheel to power your bandwidth? What year is this? I was considering to get a new computer with more memory and storage and looking into whether I build another computer and use linux or get a better apple... Looks like I will save $2k and have better backups not using Apple.

I can open iCloud.com through safari and get nearly instantaneous uploads to my little piece of iCloud Drive. Uploading through OS X software can be anything but immediate as others have posted here. Maybe a behavior change is what apple is pushing. It is discouraging nothing is coming forward for Johnny Appleseed and company. Perhaps efforts at a “unified field theory” software are not panning out ? Or maybe there has not been a way to compartmentalizations iCloud from other functions of the software. 

There is a big concern about the sync speed between Apple devices, I have files created in two MacBook Pro and those are not visible on either side, this is not related to the internet bandwidth I believe it is part of the synchronization process.

The product feedback indicated in another reply might not be answered because it is received and they will check without the commitment to reply personally.

The problem is having different versions of the same files in two different machines (meaning the saving is not immediate) therefore document portability is questioned, file version control is difficult to manage in those conditions.

I just created a file in Pages, saved it into the iCloud folder, and checked the sync between the devices, still cannot see in the other Mac. The concern is that how to trust where the information is.

I believe Apple saves part of the info (or a whole) in the machine and then upload it to the iCloud, the problem is how to preserve the document integrity if we are working from different machines into the same document (how to confirm the latest version), in the beginning, I believe it was related to program used (MS Word), but same is happening with native applications, therefore it is not related to differential program management.

Thanks,

I checked via icloudWeb and the latest files are already there, the problem is when those files are uploaded from a native program in one of the Macs, still show uploading and very difficult because I have different versions of the files due to lack of sync.

this is good for Windows, great information.

I do not have Windows, though. I have long considered iCloud Drive to be an outright, intentional bait-and-switch scam. it takes up local space inexplicably, and they claim that it's a syncing service - NOT a storage/backup service. i wondered why they sell different tiers of storage space? they never had an answer for that.

Even worse, it doesn't function as a backup, either, because if a file accidentally gets deleted on any device, it automatically deletes it from iCloud Drive and all the others.

It still gets worse - i had two Macs, both with 1TB of storage, and i also had a 2TB iCloud Drive plan. so i should have 4TB of total space, one would think, but no - almost the entire 1TB drive on both Macs gets immediately filled up from the iCloud Drive, thus reducing 3TB into 1TB. I also wonder why they allowed people to buy 2TB plans when their largest local drives (at that time) were 1TB, if it's not storage and only a syncing service, since you would never be able to sync anything larger than 1TB based on the size of your biggest local drive.

I don't use iCloud Drive because it's SO BAD. if you ever want to search for a file on your iPhone, if you click one of the results and hit "back" to go check out other results, TOO BAD. it refreshes and you have to do the same search again. Saving files is impossible because it takes so absurdly long, as this thread has been talking about. And when you want to download files on your iPhone, the speed is fast, sure, but only after an inexplicable minute or two of it spinning waiting to start the download.

[Edited by Moderator]