Migrated to Studio w/Sonoma; Can’t Start iCloud Disk

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Migrated to Studio w/Sonoma; Can’t Start iCloud Disk

I recently purchased a new Mac Studio M2 running Sonoma 14.2.1 and migrated my family’s accounts and files from our old Mac. All three accounts were successfully using iCloud Disk prior to the migration, but after the migration my account’s iCloud Disk does not appear to start up. iCloud Disk on the other two accounts works just fine.

When I try to start iCloud Drive via System Settings > Apple ID > iCloud Drive, it appears to start, I get no error, but nothing seems to be happen either. If I then open a Finder window and click on iCloud > iCloud Drive, I get a window telling me to Turn on iCloud Drive by opening Apple ID Settings - which I had already done. I checked ~/Library/Application Support/CloudDocs/ and found a newly created account_session_open_error_info file with “NSUnderlyingError_Can't import FPFS domain”. This file and error are not present in the two accounts that do work with iCloud Drive. Processes bird and cloudd are not launched under my account.

I tried the following to no effect: Signed out/in of iCloud, booted into safe mode, disabled dynamic screensavers, unplugged an external drive that is attached, and reviewed the many posts about issues with Sonoma and iCloud Disk.

Besides the issue of being unable to access my iCloud Drive files from my account, the issue also prevents me from opening/saving files, and blocks Time Machine from starting backups for all accounts on the Studio.

Any thoughts on the FPFS error message or how to reset the iCloud Disk sync status? Without a fix or workaround, my next step is to create a new account and port my files over to it. Is that a manual process or are there tools to help?

Thanks,

Will

Posted on Dec 27, 2023 5:48 PM

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Answer 1

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Will Deatrick Author

Level 2

163 points

Dec 28, 2023 4:48 PM in response to Will Deatrick

I spent a couple hours on the phone with Apple Support this morning, and the iCloud Disk issue I had with Sonoma now appears resolved. A very pleasant advisor had me repeat some of the trouble-shooting steps I performed earlier then concluded my account’s permissions and/or system files were hosed. To recover, he had me:

Use terminal to reset permissions by typing: diskutil resetUserPermissions / `id -u`
Boot into recovery mode
Run Utilities > Terminal to repair permissions by typing: repairHomePermissions
Exit Terminal and reinstall Sonoma

I remember earlier versions of macOS had a Disk Utility with a Repair Permissions capability. I’m glad to see equivalent command-line versions were kept.

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Answer 2

Will Deatrick Author

Level 2

163 points

Jan 2, 2024 5:54 AM in response to BobGuthrie

Hi Bob:

A frustrating situation to be sure. The reinstall of Sonoma had no impact on my user files stored locally or on iCloud Disk. In my case, I think the Apple advisor correctly diagnosed that privileges and/or system files were damaged during my migration. The approach of reseting privileges and reinstalling Sonoma fixed my problem quickly, and I have had no problems with iCloud Disk since.

I wish my migration had gone more smoothly, but I was very happy to be back in operation quickly. I spent the previous week reading posts and trying to determine what was causing my iCloud Drive issue. I hope you can find a solution that works for your situation.

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Answer 3

Jan 2, 2024 1:35 AM in response to Will Deatrick

"Exit Terminal and reinstall Sonoma"...

Reinstall?, Reinstall?!!...

This is my animation work computer, with deadlines, I can't access my animation media, and "reinstall" is not a solution for people who have to work on Macs. right. now.

Everybody at my onsite work is going crazy trying to get this problem solved, and all the solutions I have seen about this... fiasco are putting the problem/work right on the shoulders of users to fix, not Apple,...

And now, this: "Reinstall"... This is not a "professional" solution to give working users.

Back to Reddit. I am getting better solutions there than here.

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Migrated to Studio w/Sonoma; Can’t Start iCloud Disk

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