Just sharing: If your reminders stopped syncing, you might have exceeded the limits

I just wanted to share my experience so that the next person who comes across this problem could spend less time wondering what's going on.

I have a Macbook Pro running 10.9.4, a Retina iPad, and an iPhone 5s, both running iOS 7.1.2. From time to time the Reminders apps on my iPad and iPhone would act crazy (refusing to remove a completed reminder from a list, duplicating reminders all on their own, not registering edits to the reminders, etc.) or stop syncing between themselves, but the sync problem is usually resolved in a couple of days (no help with the other problems, though). For the past few days, though, the reminders have stopped syncing completely. Although the apps themselves are usable on the individual devices (I can add, edit, delete reminders just fine--though some of the aforementioned problems remained), there has been no syncing going on between them.

I tried restarting the devices, disabling and re-enabling the Reminder apps on my iPad and iPhone, and still nothing.

I thought it was yet another bug with my Apple products (gone were the days when my G5 just worked. My iPhone and iPad are still restarting randomly, and my MBP is still losing WiFi randomly), until I opened the Calendar app on my MBP and saw a warning sign next to the list of my calendars (I wouldn't have seen it if I didn't have the calendar pane opened).

When I clicked on the warning sign, I was informed that the latest reminder I added on my MBP failed to sync because I have exceeded my quota. Mind you, there was no warnings whatsoever on my iPad or iPhone. I only saw the warning because I was looking at the list of calendars in my Calendar app on my MBP, which I rarely do.

Since I like jotting down ideas on my iPhone's Reminder app, I do have a lot of reminders. Also, completed reminders have to be deleted manually, so I wasn't surprised that I have exceeded the quota. What did surprise me was that there was no indication whatsoever on my iPhone or iPad. The syncing just stopped, and that was it, we are supposed to figure out the reason all on our own. Even the troubleshooting article didn't mention how to check if we have exceeded our quota:

iCloud: Troubleshooting iCloud Reminders and Tasks

So, I exported all my reminder lists on my MBP as a backup, deleted all my completed reminders (which was about 13MB in size), moved a bunch of current reminders to Podio.com, and waited and waited and waited for the reminders to be updated on my iPad and iPhone. It took a long time to sync, but they were finally syncing again.

So I'm going to remind myself to regularly delete completed reminders from now on, and only use the Reminder app to jot down stuff that need to be recorded in a hurry. (I also use the Notes app heavily but it's not really well-organized, so I'm starting to use Day One instead of Notes as well.)

Keywords: reminders not syncing, iOS syncing problem, iCloud syncing problem, reminders stopped working, reminder sync problem, reminders not updating