iCloud doesn't work on MacOS 14 Sonoma

Have you activated iCloud Drive? Have you upgraded your storage? The Sonoma upgrade worked just fine for me. Do you realize how much money they make with $2.99/month? What I don’t like is that they take all your stuff without asking!

I can't believe it's taking Apple this long to fix the issue. I have a case # with apple senior support and I hear from them once a week after engineering request more information from me. They ask me to do the things I've done 1000 times already. Log in/out of icloud, delete my VPN, reset network settings, etc. all to no use. So now I'm waiting for the next worthless call (I actually have to call them) for them to tell me engineering needs more info. There's enough people out there with problems that they should be working around the clock to fix it. And I'm paying for 2TB plan and need to upgrade that, but no 4TB plan only 6TB and 12TB!! Such a joke.

I looks like Apple Support has finally come through with a solution: If your user folder is stored on an external drive, the drive has to be formatted as APFS. Obviously making that change is a big deal (maybe you should just buy a new external drive), but once it's done, iCloud Drive works like it should...

Why should you use an external drive when you have paid for iCloud to keep your files in??? Doesn't make sense. If you use an external drive you then would not need to use iCloud at all for your files. But would have to lug around an extra piece of equipment. That is no solution to anything. Sonoma should just work. iCloud should just work. It is ridiculous of even having the idea of taking all sorts of bizarre extra steps to just get the basics to work.

Dear apple team, you have to provide some working solution to accept the terms and conditions for this problem.

Me, as dev, have all the projects kept within icloud. Now realized, that i spent already 3 hours by trying find a solution and make things work.

If you'll count all developers, designers average hour cost to solve this issue, you'll get pretty big amount of money we spent.

Provide the solution and avoid such a cr*p being delivered on production.

So after working with a senior support specialist for more than 3 weeks, I was told to wait until a future update fixes the problem and she said that would be maybe next month or even longer. It's unbelievable that after all the money people are paying for iCloud that Apple can't figure this out. They should revert everyone back to the previous OS since that worked until they can figure this thing out once and for all, but I'm sure they won't do that as that would be admitting they messed up. I hope Apple reads these messages, but I'm sure they don't.

This article (and Apple's "dataless" technical article linked to it) seems to provide a reasonable explanation about the problem—files that are stalled: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/10/25/macos-sonoma-has-changed-icloud-drive-radically/#:~:text=Summary,its%20entire%20contents%20from%20iCloud.

Even if iCloud is uploading and modifying the properties of all files it has stored ("evicted"), it makes no sense that this takes such a long time. In my case, 72 hours now without access to the files via Finder (only on the very limited Web version of iCloud).

The question is: Is it better to wipe out the drive and try to downgrade or stick to Sonoma and hope for a fix? Are the (so far) cosmetic changes worth the trouble? I wonder if a downgrade to Ventura would get me back on my feet faster.

So far, Sonoma is a huge waste of time—very frustrating, Apple!

Hi there,

I tried the Safe Mode that chuckbl suggested and it didn't help. But what it did is to log out of my apple id, restart my computer, and log back. All files appeared. Hope this might help someone with the same issue.

My issue in notes is quite different. The app is just constantly showing the spinning wheel of updating sync. Any new notes do sync as they show up on iPad etc. I can type a new note of text but cannot type in any lists of hashtags or try and edit something already written. When trying to do that every grinds to a halt. Notes work normally on iPad so it is a Sonoma issue as everything was fine on MacBook before the update. It is seriously frustrating having to go to online iCloud to use the Notes. I have now had to start to type notes in Word as whilst not handy for the purpose at least it does not take 5 minutes to type in a word!

At the moment I have lost all trust in Apple🤬

Just had notification for updates on iPad and iPhone. Have cancelled auto updates and will wait until they sort Sonama.

Worried that the same problems will appear in IOS.

I upgraded to Sonoma to get rid of a crashing problem without a hardware cause. Maybe a problem with the AppleId. Reading the thread, I suppose it was an iCloud problem all along. Computer erased, new Id and still a few crashes. New user account with old Id: no crash so far but no iCloud either, but all contacts, no files nor notes. After a few restarts, I got the Id icon back, a few more and I got access to notes.

No files in Finder, but the content bar in the Id shows them. Logout didn’t help.

I finally got it to work, suddenly, like nothing was ever wrong.

Waiting a day logged out and no wifi did nothing.

I then tried a family share with my other account for which I had set up a second user on the computer; it did not work and so I deleted the family share.

After that, I saw under Account, Apps using iCloud, a line iCloud, switched off. Switched on and everything was there. After a few hours searching the day before and opening the settings multiple times, reading every line, I'm inclined to believe it was not there before and changing the family share setting brought it to the fore.

Rather crazy by the way, that "Should iCloud use iCloud?" is a setting and it's default is "off".

I just resolved this with a very helpful Chat Support agent Bernadeth just now, Dec. 2 10:12am PST Asia Pacific. When MacOS users update to Sonoma, they need to logout/login their AppleID/iCloud ID on the MBP. Once you relogin, your iCloud will be synced. You may have to restart your router to to sync the "List of Devices" portion in Systems Settings. Works perfectly.

Same general issue here across two Macs, one Intel, the other M2. The common denominator: Sonoma. What wound up working was to disable iCloud drive. One that was off, the Finder behaved properly. I could open an app and open a file, whereas before, I would never get the file dialog box and the app would behave as if I had never tried "File open" at all.

But I, too, could not originally login to iCloud at all. Don't know how that resolved itself, but once it did, and I wanted to use iCloud drive, in addition to an unusable Finder, I could not select "Data and Documents" to sync because the system informed me that I had "too many files, folders, nested folders" and some such nonsense that prevented it. Still don't know why it claims that, but after turning off iCloud drive, everything works as normal, including the iCloud services outside of iCloud drive.

My iCloud quit working when I updated to Sonoma. With iCloud turned off, everything was normal. The user file for my Mac Mini 2018 is on an external drive. The solid state external drive was not formatted in APFS. I bought a new SSD, formatted it in APFS, and transferred my user file to it. Turned iCloud back on, and Presto! Everything works like a charm. SSDs in Sonoma must be formatted in APFS!!