iCloud Restore on iPad will take ~30 days, despite fiber connection....

I use an iPad Pro from 2020 (pre-m1) to create paintings in Procreate. I'm a professional artist, I work in Hollywood, so I've created a LOT of paintings, something like 300 gigs worth. Since this is my livelihood, I have a fiber connection so I can transfer hundreds of gigs to my clients.

At the end of January I cleared all my iCloud Backups of my iPad and created a whole new complete backup. That process took something like 2-4 hours, which is consistent with what this connection is capable of. It's also an important detail because roughly a week later my iPad refused to boot and I ended up having to do a factory reset. (I just want to be super duper extra clear that I do mean I uploaded 400 gigs or so to iCloud in 2-4 hours, NOT incremental... ugh I did not like how many times I had to clarify that.)

The reset went okay, if a bit sluggish. However, Procreate was taking a really long time to progress. After day four I stopped the restore and started it over. This is something that is always suggested when this sort of problem occurs, so I tried it, but I did not notice a change in speed. In the control panel you can see how much is left of the transfer, and I took screengrabs of it several times throughout the week. The number steadily climbed down. Unfortunately it was moving at less than ten gigs a day. Since I had 300 gigs, 10 gigs a day works out to approx 30 days to complete. I'd be halfway done by now had I not restarted it hoping for faster.

I called Apple's technical support, they escalated me to a senior technician, and we did some troubleshooting. Unfortunately we had a breakdown in communication. That agent seemed very firm on the position that my internet connection was the problem. While I see why that might be the initial conclusion, I ran a test that I think disproves that notion. I used iCloud Drive to put an 8 gigabyte quicktime on my iPad. It took 3 minutes to get that file down and start playing. I recorded this. I sent this video to the Apple tech. Just to be clear, this video not only shows that my connection is averaging higher than 500 megabits on both upload and download (FIBER!!!), but it also shows I am capable of getting data from iCloud many many times faster than downloading that data back from Apple.

The tech saw this, but in light of this demonstration they did not offer any additional information about why my connection is the issue, instead they stuck to the position that my connection was the problem. They said all I could do was let the download play out. Here are a few reasons why that is problematic:

• I cannot use my painting app until the download is complete. No painting for me for a LOOONG time. This is how iOS is designed.
• I *have* to leave my iPad on the internet, that entire time. iOS will *not* perform *any* software updates until that restore is complete. That is a big security concern.
• I'm pretty sure that the iPad wouldn't be able to continue doing automatic backups while that restore is happening, so I'm giving up this service im paying for until that is done. (if I'm wrong about this please let me know.)
• If something happens forcing me to abort it, I have to do it ALL over again. There is no 'resume' feature. Worse, there is *nothing* that says it won't take even longer... maybe 60 days, maybe 90.

This video I made should show that Apple DEFINITELY has some sort of bottleneck with iCloud backups. Unfortunately what they told me was I'm using too much data .. I'm on a 2 tb plan but using it is the problem. I am *very* frustrated. I've been paying north of $30 a month for iCloud Backup services for more than a couple of years, now that I need it I'm being told the reasons its failing are my fault without being able to bring to light something I could actually do to fix my connection and get my paintings back.

30 days to get 300 gigs on a high-end internet connection is not an acceptable standard for a cloud backup that costs this much. I'm regretting just how much money I've spent.

[Edited by Moderator]