iCloud items in preference pane greyed out in Yosemite

In addition to iCloud preferences being greyed out, my iCloud drive folder says "iCloud Drive- Setting up iCloud Drive...". It has said that message since yesterday. I tried many thing, including resetting the account, restarting, etc. but I still arrive at the same issue. I hope this gets resolved.

update: my iCloud Drive preference pane is no longer greyed out. However the other issue remains. Fingers crossed.

Final update: all my issues have been resolved.

🙂

Did you get this figured out? I'm having the same problem.

Thanks!

Yuck. I'm glad you found a workaround, but I've got 6 accounts on this Mac and they all have the iCloud preferences grayed out. I would rather a fix than a workaround. If anyone out there with this problem figures out the solution, please post here!

I've got the exact problem as Rudestroem. Apple has to give a better solution than creating a new user account.

same problem here on 1 of my 3 machines. Other 2 show the iCloud preference pane as expected, but 1 machine shows all items greyed out and every time I open mail I'm warned about a problem with my iCloud acount and need to give a password again. Most iCloud services on the machine work, but slower, but I cannot access account details from the preference pane. Will try your solution if the first 10.10 update doesn't fix it.

thanks for posting your fix

For what it's worth, I eventually gave up on expecting a solution to this problem and instead did what Rudestroem did. From an Admin account, I deleted each of the affected accounts from the User Profiles section in System Preferences (using the 'Keep home folder' option), then re-created each account with the same original user profile name. I then copied all contents of the 'User (deleted)' home folder into the new home folder. At this point I could login to my 'new' account and access my documents, downloads, etc., and as expected the iCloud preferences were now working fine. The final step was to delete the 'old' user home folder and begin the laborious task of redoing all my account settings.

Repeat for each affected iCloud user on the Mac. The whole process took considerable time, but the end result is that all accounts are working great. Bummer about this, although it doesn't seem to be affecting too many folks.

I encountered the same problems. The iCould System Prefs App would not let me sign out or sign-in. All the iCloud options were greyed out. I finally got it resolved without creating a new user account. I figured it was a home folder permissions issue, after much poking around in the ~/Library folder. I had to reset the permissions on the home folder and enclosing folders using Finder.

Here's what I did:

1. Open Finder and select the home folder icon in the sidebar on the left

2. Press Command+I to bring up the Info window. Scroll down to the "Sharing and Permissions" section. Click on the Lock/Unlock button in the bottom right hand corner of the window, and enter the admin password to enable changes to be made.

3. Click on the "gear" button and click on the "Apply to enclosed items..."

This will set the permissions on the home folder and its subfolders. After this the iCloud preferences pane allowed me to make changes and save it. Also fixed the iCould Drive issue that I had.

Hope this helps someone out there.

Hi Starprowler

I have the same problem and have followed your advice, but it doesn't work for me. Is there anything I might have missed?

I have now tried it three times, but still the pane is greyed out.

Any further advice gratefully received.

same here. Apple needs to find a fix for this

Thanks for this tip Starprowler. Resetting the permissions on my ~Library folder (and all enclosed items) fixed the problem for me.

Your solution worked for me. Thank you for posting it!