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

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.

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!

Just bumping this thread since it exactly described my problem and had a solution I was looking for days - creating a new user... fwiw, I actually ended up creating 2 new users: 1 that I used as just a temporary admin user so I could delete my first user (with my preferred username) and then created a second new user with my original (preferred) username.

Don't know if it makes a difference, but just fyi, my second user (temporary) user has ID 502, and my third (preferred) user is back to 501 - and iCloud Drive seems to be working... just fyi...

same exact problem here.

I just solve this by reinstalling macOS 11.1 after reformatting my drive.

hope this helps.

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 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.

I'm going to add my voice to this issue because mine won't sync either. Same Apple ID, and just like you guys it still works on my intel iMac and 15" MBP. However, because I have trusted iCloud with my production files I backed all the iCloud data up in 3 places prior to this journey. I remember the days of cryptic messages like "Do you really want to turn off iCloud, if so, do you want to download them to this Mac? Since to this day I have never known whether that means the files in the cloud would be deleted, I have always backed up, closed my eyes and pushed the button.

I'm not so trustworthy with M1. My Apple ID account sees the new computer, but iCloud doesn't have it in the settings where it shows devices using iCloud. This is a serious issue. And it's the reason I knew this M1 was $2K test machine and might actually never become a serious production machine. I'm playing with it in hopes that when the 16" flamethrowers come out, the will have worked out all the bugs. This is a seriously big bug. I am constantly defending iCloud. Probably not going to do that anymore, especially since multiple help sessions don't seem to be solving the problem. I worry about unchecking that iCloud box for the reasons I stated above.

I'll continue to monitor and report back and let's hope we find an answer.

Boy has 2020 really bit the big one. COVID vaccine aside, I feel like Apple is experimenting on me. I've had other bumps in this M1 road. My performance hasn't been as good as I had hoped.

Love to know more about what's happening with you, and I'll go into my issues, which include PS Beta and crash crash crash with the photos app. Ugh.

Same problem here, with brand new M1 MacBook Pro. And even more ...

First everything went smooth for 3 days. I already configured iCloud completely as I wished. Then during working a distracting windows like message popup came up, something like "do you really not want to sync documents and desktop?" Wow, because you know I configured it on purpose to not sync, but ask me again. As I do not use both of places, I declined. And that crashed iCloud Sync at all. Not only desktop and documents were not synced, as before and wanted, the whole connection was disabled by this stu popup. All files were moved to archive. And ever since iCloud Drive could not be revived. Not with all I know from years, not with all the tricks in this thread.

Then I used Apple Support. They were helpless, so then senior support. Wow, what a waste of time. Did not help that I already tried everything. I needed to do everything(!) again during the few hours call. What a waste. Of course same result. Then the brilliant "solution" wipe you whole system clean and set it up fresh. Well because that is not wasting more time...

But wait, it gets better. This was not even possible. After reformating harddisk and reinstalling BigSur v11.1, no user could be created in the standard procedure. After three attempts and a force restart, all three are there but not even possible to login or retrieve via Apple-ID. They are corrupted, because the setup cannot finish. Completely reproducible all the times you want. So WOW, not even the backup system works. And also not with a downloaded system from another Mac on USB Stick. (You can find the stories from others too about this behavior. With 11.1 that is btw.)

Bottom line: Apple Support gave up. M1 is messed up and not more than a disappointing prototype. Christmas was ruined. And the MacBook is on its postal way back for a refund.

Perhaps an M2 then ... someday ... or not.

See my solution in this thread.

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.

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?

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!