iCloud Drive folder is not syncing on my new M1 MacBook Air.

I have the exact same problem with my MacBook Pro.

I've been in touch with Apple Support for a week. It's about 2 days between each call from them, so it's not moving forward fast. After the last call they put my iCloud account into some sore of debug mode. Next call is scheduled for tomorrow.

"brctl status" says "BROKEN STRUCTURE".

I faced the same issue and contacted Apple Support. They recommended to try safe mode (didn't help), followed by creating a new user on the macbook air and see if Documents & Desktop sync works there. Well, strange enough, it did work for me. Then I deleted my original account and recreated it, but it failed with the newly created account. So I ended up keeping the account that worked (uid 502), but changed its login name to the one I usually use. Don't really know why it didn't work for the original account, can only guess it to be related to the first userid (501).

I have an M1 MacBook Pro and I am experiencing the same problem. I have logged off and on my Apple ID multiple times in hopes of jump starting the iCloud download but I am still only seeing local items.

I have the same issue with my M1 MacBook Pro. Had a latest version Intel MacBook Pro 13", which I returned for the M1 MacBook Pro. iCloud worked fine with the Intel. Apple Support did not find a solution either. Turn iCloud off and on and following restart with emptying the RAM did not solve the issue.

I have the same issue. Last week I had the same issue on the first MacBook Air M1 they sent. We tried everything under the sun to fix it. They even had me erase the hard drive and then it wouldn’t reinstall macOS bug sur.. so they had me send it back and they sent me a new one. This one I got today and it still can’t see the iCloud Drive folders. It has to be related to the account and the new m1 Mac because it works just fine in my old MacBook and iMac both of which were upgraded to Big Sur.

For whatever reason, it now worked on my M1 MacBook Pro. I bought and installed the Mac on Monday. I frequently deleted iCloud Drive from iCloud under System Preferences, restarted afterwards and then switched iCloud Drive on again. Just called the Apple service and suddenly saw that folders had appeared. They told me, that it sometimes takes quite a while and that the MacBook might have prioritized to download my photo library.

I created a new user. Logged in and set everything up. I restarted the computer and then all of a sudden everything started to load on my desktop and in iCloud. Finder works great too. I deleted the old user and I am good to go. Thanks

Hey there! This may be caused by several factors.

I have noticed lately it’s taken a while for the Desktop and Documents portion of iCloud Drive to sync once enabled, however, if disabling iCloud Drive, restarting, Enabling it again, and giving it some good time to complete doesn’t fix it:

My hunch, (And I could be wrong), but considering it seems to sync fine in other users:

I’d probably sign out of my Apple ID in System Preferences.

Change the admin password, (Even temporarily), restart.

Sign back into the Apple ID in System Preferences, restart and test.

Its probably either a user permissions or preference conflict, or a conflict with the local and iCloud Keychains, if not an item in System Preferences > Users and Groups > Login Items. (Sometimes a good test is just removing these / Restarting. (This doesn’t delete the apps, just prevents them from opening automatically).

Hope that helps.

SOLVED! Thanks Peterdenb.

After my 3 day nightmare, I finally have my Mac. And it was the creating the new user that did the trick....BUT there are 2 other VERY important things you need to know to make this go smoothly. I had seen these in the developer forums, and they made the difference here. Just creating the new user alone wasn't good enough without the other two, mainly being plugged in.

1) Make sure you are plugged into power with the power brick and cord that came with the Mac. I originally had it plugged into my BenQ monitor (which also provides power) and it was not the same as using the brick that came with it. Power is the key to making all this setup initially happen. It just won't happen on battery alone. At least not fast, anyway when you have gigs and gigs in iCloud Drive.

2) Create the new user and log in to the same Apple Id. And enable Icloud Drive, etc. Once all is setup, delete the original user.

3) Photos Come First: For some reason, Apple prioritizes the downloading and "stylizing" of your entire photo library before it does anything else. I saw this on the dev board and it is 100% true. And your machine HAS to be plugged in while this is happening, or this whole process stalls--which may have been my whole problem, but I'm not going to go back and check again. I let this do its thing overnight... I have a huge photo library and it took that long.

After the photos were done, it's like I woke up to my current laptop. Everything was there. Every recent, every setting, everything. All I have to do is reinstall the apps. And like Peter said, it's fast--very fast--and much snappier than when I was originally wrestling with it.

I'm sure most people don' have huge amounts of files in iCloud Drive like I do. But I also wonder how many give up and send the machine back because they don't know to or can't find the tips and tricks we worked on together here?

Thanks everybody for your help! It was priceless. M1 Here I come! 😄

Glad it worked for you too!

I did have the power connected and interestingly Photos already synced while I had the issues (is that purely based on AppleID rather than iCloud?). I don't have anything stored on iCloud Drive so after creating the new user I was instantly in a whole new world.

The only thing I can imagine to have caused this mess is me accepting the offer to migrate data from another laptop to the Mac as part of the setup process. Turned out this was extremely slow (over WiFi) but I gave it a night to complete. During that time the connection between the laptops was interrupted, rather than retrying I just skipped it. Syncing problems (except Photos, Books and occasionally (!) Safari) started immediately so it was definitely not caused by anything I configured, installed or copied to the machine.

This didn't work for me unfortunately. I think I've tries most suggestions in this thread:

1) Changed password on account

2) Created a second account

3) Reinstalled Big Sur

4) Disabled iCloud Drive on all my devices for 5+ hours (Suggested by Apples Support) and then turned on again.

In all cases "brctl status" at first indicates that some folders needs to be synced and after a little while "brctl status" says "BROKEN STRUCTURE". So for me it doesn't seem like it's just slow because something else is syncing. Something is broken.

Anybody else still having issues? What does "brctl status" return?

DiZoE, thanks for all your ideas!

Other devices sync without any issues. Addition test account on other MacBook sync without issues from scratch. Test account on M1 Mac fail, just like the main account.

If no other Mac is syncing, those newly created accounts on other MacBooks start showing folders in iCloud Drive within minutes.

Recently Deleted is empty, trashes are emptied.

I think I've tries most other things suggested too.

Side note, this happens on the M1:

"> ls -l Library/Application\ Support/CloudDocs/session/db 

ls: db: Operation not permitted"

, but not on an older Intel MacBook running Big Sur. sessions/db can't be listed, nor deleted on the M1. Unless I'm in the Terminal in recovery mode.

I'm not ready to remove all data from iCloud.com yet. I've got a lot of production data there and don't want to risk of altering any time stamps or make other mistakes in the process. I'll give Apple Support some more time to find the issue.

Sounds good, looks like you’ve already done your homework. Maybe it is something they need to work out on their end after they get rid of the kinks in the new OS, (Or hardware), I’m sure working with them will help, not just you, but others as well. Best of luck! Let me know how it goes if you get a chance!

Okay I gotcha! Thanks for the update, so in a nut shell:

Enabling Desktop and Documents, disabling iCloud Drive, enabling again, they started to show? Interesting.

I do believe, that Desktop and Documents are normally are not enabled by default when signing in, and enabling the two available check boxes from what I’ve seen. But sounds like you found a possible workaround. Good to know, hopefully it sticks, and this can be prevented in the next few updates! Did you let the Apple advisor you’re working with know? In either case, good to hear!

YES!!!!! FINALLY! Ok.. I tried the create a new account with it plugged into the power plug that came with the MacBook Air M1.. and setup iCloud... opened photos first... waited for them to arrive..... and BOOM files started appearing on the desktop ... it worked perfectly. Setup of all iCloud and iCloud Drive is complete. I am sooo happy. This thing is epic fast... faster than my i9 desktop iMac. Its absolutely ridiculous. Thanks for all you guys and your help!