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.