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iCloud Drive not syncing locally

I started this Discussion because there are several started already with the exact same issue, so I’ve tried to find them all and post links to this Discussion, mainly because I have spent over 4.5hrs on the phone with Apple today still with no solution and this is my story.

It’s obvious from these other Discussions that there is a problem and Apple needs to fix this issue. Overall Yosemite is working fine excluding this one very big problem.

I have updated to all the latest software apps, iOS’s & OS’s.

My iCloud Drive is working fine on my iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Air & on iCloud.com.

My iCloud Drive is not syncing locally on my iMac.

My iCloud Drive on my iMac simply shows an empty folder or broken folders/files. If you place an item in there it doesn’t show up anywhere else and none of the items that are showing up on my iCloud Drive on my iDevices & iCloud.com will show up locally on my iMac.

Occasionally I have seen a handful of either Pages, Numbers or Keynote folders with my files with an iCloud icon & a dead progress bar next to them in my local iCloud Drive folder, but none of these files are accessible via their respective local app counterparts, they just appear to be frozen in time.

While on the phone with Apple and talking with 3 different representatives (including 2 Senior Advisors) they had me do a whole gambit of things which I have listed below, but none of them did anything constructive. I was told that my issue would now be sent to Engineering and I would have a solution in 1-2 business days.

Below are all the things that were attempted & requested by Apple to perform in no particular order. After each request the local iCloud Drive folder was checked and nothing ever changed.

1. Zapped the PRAM

2. Booted into Safe Mode (Extensions off)

3. Rebooted cable modem.

4. Rebooted router.

5. Rebooted iMac dozens of times.

6. Tried hardwired & Wi-Fi connections.

7. USB tethered to iPhone using LTE.

8. Signed out of iCloud account & logged back in.

9. Disabled iCloud Drive & reenabled dozens of times.

10. Created another Admin account and switched users.

11. Waited 24hrs+ and still nothing in local iCloud Drive.

12. Reinstalled Yosemite.

13. Repaired Permissions.

I hope Apple or someone has a solution for this very soon because it’s impossible to work efficiently when you can’t use your Pages, Numbers nor Keynote apps to create or edit documents locally.

The only thing they offered, which I was already aware of, was that I could download my documents from the iCloud Drive via iCloud.com and work with them locally or work with them online at iCloud.com. I’d prefer to work locally using my shared documents, but that’s exactly what I can’t do.

Please share if there are other things you have attempted and/or if you have also called Apple in utter frustration and if they offered any solutions other than what I have listed.

I’m willing to try anything at this point, but my guess is that there will be an update very soon to address this and other problems.

Thank you,

-Doren

iMac, OS X Yosemite (10.10), 3.5GHz Intel Core i7, 32GB, 27"

Posted on Oct 19, 2014 8:09 PM

189 replies

Nov 17, 2014 4:54 AM in response to gsherwood

In my case, the problem was that I was using iRamDisk to create the User Cache in a Ram Disk. When I switched to another account, I was using a normal user cache and it therefore worked. Once I figured that out and deleted the Ram disk I was using for user cache, my icloud drive started working properly.

Nov 18, 2014 2:12 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

I am *possibly* about to make your day. I hope so anyway!

I had the exact same problem - tried all the stuff you had, signing out of iCloud, signing in again. Nothing worked. My iCloud Drive was half stuck, with only some files actually being shown, and none accessible.

Console showed loads of errors in file writes. I made a new Administrator user account and found I could sign in to that on iCloud and iCloud drive worked fine!

After removing any Keychain iCloud related entries I was still no closer to a fix. I even dumped all my Apple preferences to no avail. Then I looked at the Console and noticed that most of the errors seemed to relate to the sandbox refusing the cloudd process to write to disk.

Then by comparing various folders in Library between a virgin non-iCloud signed-in account with what happened to these folders when iCloud was signed in I found the following folders were created in ~/Library/Containers as a result of signing in and switching on iCloud Drive:

com.apple.DataDetectorsDynamicData

com.apple.internetaccounts

com.apple.CloudPhotosConfiguration

com.apple.notes

Looking inside com.apple.internetaccounts the container.plist file contained a great big entry entitled SandboxProfileData. Aha! Could this be the thing that Sandbox was complaining about, thus not letting the iCloud Drives files be created on the hard drive?

Anyway - I signed out of iCloud completely in my account, waited a minute, deleted these 4 folders, restarted the iMac and signed in to iCloud.

Lo and behold, iCloud Drive now works beautifully!

Hope this helps ...

For the non-techie amongst you, you get the ~/Library/Containers folder by opening Finder, and whilst holding down the ALT key click on "Go" on the top menu and you'll see "Library" - click on that. Inside you'll see the Containers folder.

MaxAge

Level 1

0 points

Nov 19, 2014 6:22 AM in response to Tony Davenport

That did the trick for me, thanks a lot!

fwpoppel

Level 1

0 points

Nov 19, 2014 9:34 PM in response to Tony Davenport

Nope did not work for me. It does work mind you. A file of a wopping 500KB did fully download (in a couple of hours). The rest is still downloading incredibly slowly. Not even close to anything I can just download normally over my internet connection. I don't mind that Apple gives no feedback whatsoever for diagnostics (like what iCloud Drive is doing in the background - KB / sec for example, which file it is downloading etc) but then it should simply work....

I give up (again) and wait for Apple to fix (or at least acknowledge it is an issue in the first case)....

Nov 24, 2014 2:38 PM in response to cmaus

Great, putting the old ...CloudsDocs into the trash creates a new one and seems to fix the issue (I hope everything is still there after restarting).

Solved various synchronizations issues with a number of (all?) apps on my iPad and iPhone. I used "notes" to check ync performance creating new files on the differnt devices (including iCloud Notes on the web). NO GURANTEE THAT IT WORKS ALWAYS AS YOU WISH, TRY AT YOUR OWN RISK ONLY AFTER SYSTEM BACKUP.

BTW: I found some similar issue with iPhoto when I was trying to install the new iPhoto. It kept asking me for downloading the update. The I deleted an old iPhoto folder in ~/Library/Application Support and suddently the new iPhoto started asking for an app to convert the old iP7 db to iP8 which I downloaded and ran - took 30+ minutes.

Who did this? This is lousy and not at all like Apple style user comfort.

cigame

Level 1

141 points

Nov 25, 2014 3:18 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

Had similar symptoms on my mac mini when I realized that my user Library folder was locked.

Don't know how this happened.

Maybe because I used to be a Mac OS beta tester.

Unlocked it and iCloud drive is working.

Nov 26, 2014 5:11 PM in response to cmaus

unable to locate CloudDocs

Nov 27, 2014 6:35 PM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

So, I have a slightly different problem. I have the new iMac retina and macbook pro retina and this problem occurs on BOTH computers(10.10.1).

Whenever I update something from one computer, it gets updated on iCloud.com(so, i know it's able to push information to the cloud fine). However, the second computer never gets the update.........UNTIL I update something on that computer's iCloud drive, THEN it magically pulls in the update from the first computer.

It seems like the iCloud server doesn't seem to automatically send an update to the macs whenever there's a change.

If it makes any difference, I was a beta iCloud.com user.

Nov 28, 2014 3:30 PM in response to JohnMac999

Hmmm, I don't know what happened but everything is working fine now. That was weird. I didn't make any changes.

Dec 2, 2014 4:42 PM in response to Mitchla

This seams to have worked for me

Intagli

Level 1

5 points

Dec 3, 2014 3:17 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

I have the same problem, posted here Unable to activate iCloud Drive on OS X Yosemite 10.10.1

I keep getting errors like:

cloudd: SQL error: 'DELETE FROM CSChunkTable WHERE ct_iid = 596', (11) database disk image is malformed

Also tried deleting the CloudDocs folder with no success. This thread has over 10,000 views already so this seems to be a rather widespread issue...

Intagli

Level 1

5 points

Dec 3, 2014 4:11 AM in response to Intagli

I signed out off iCloud completely, waited for a few minutes, deleted:

~/Library/Caches/CloudKit

~/Library/Containers

com.apple.DataDetectorsDynamicData
com.apple.internetaccounts
com.apple.CloudPhotosConfiguration
com.apple.notes

repaired disk permissions,

deleted the contents of

~/Library/Accounts

as per Corrupted user in 10.8 (server)

and unlocked my Library folder.

I also deleted the contents of my iCloud Documents (Pages,Numbers,Keynote) but I don't know if this contributed to fixing the issue.

Then I rebooted, and signed back into iCoud again. it's working (for now)...

Dec 5, 2014 5:09 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

Same problem - Macs just don't sync for ages but I find creating a new folder on the offending mac's iCloud drive jerks the syncing into action. Anyone else finding this? And like the chap above, I was an iCloud Beta user

Dec 13, 2014 3:14 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

Solution

I believe I just found a solution for this problem.

I had the same issue with iCloud drive and nothing I tried helped (I really tried everything). Until now.

On your iOS device go to Settings -> iCloud -> Storage -> Manage Storage -> Other Documents -> Edit -> Delete All (Backup first if you haven't already)

And that's it. I have done this and now if I create folders or put documents in iCloud drive on Yosemite, iCloud.com or Windows (had to reinstall iCloud on Windows) it now get uploaded and synced as it should. And its syncing really fast.

This fixed it for me and I hope it works for you too.

Dec 14, 2014 7:31 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

iCloud Drive is another epic FAIL by Apple in an attempt to provide any reasonably dependable cloud syncing services, go figure! Last month when Yosemite was released, I signed up for 300 gb of storage and added 70+ GB to my iCloud Drive folder which I just wanted to keep synced between 2 Macs. It took forever to sync, as a matter if fact, Im not sure it EVER did fully sync. I have Xfinity (Comcast) as my ISP and as most are aware, they have a 300 GB a month Bandwidth limit. I have never exceded it, and normally do go over 200 GB a month (and I don't use Netflix or any other streaming/download movie services). I started getting warning from Comcast that I was reaching my limit and then i went over my limit, and eventually by the end of the month, I used over 800 GB of bandwidth. Then, 2 days into the new month, I had used over 50% of my monthly limit, Im like ***! I decided to turn off iCloud drive and the problem was resolved. So I decided stop syncing that 70+ GB of data, move my data to a different drive/folder and deleted it from my iClould drive in Finder thinking it was gone but no! It's still on the cloud. Anytime I turn on iCloud Drive back on it wants to eat up my bandwidth again and start syncing that data. I finally just had to turn off iCloud Drive on all of my computers/devices and contacted Apple. They couldn't even delete the files on the cloud. They put my account in troubleshooting mode and it's been almost 2 weeks now and Im still waiting for them to fix this issue. At this point I just what them to delete those documents so I can turn iCloud Drive back on so the applications that use iCloud Drive can sync its data, but at this point in time, I can't use those applications because I can't turn iCloud Drive back on, not if I want any bandwidth left for the rest of the month. Im so dissipointed in Apple, they have totally screwed up with iCloud Drive! What a shame, I really thought they would get it right this time, but they just can't seem to get a clue how to make this service work. Maybe they need to buy DropBox and or SugarSync so they will have someone smart enough to fix it!

iCloud Drive not syncing locally