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

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Posted on Nov 19, 2017 6:23 PM

There are multiple different "Library" folders on your mac, you need to make sure you check the right one (the user library) which is hidden. You can find this by launching finder, holding down the option key, and clicking go in the menu bar (the library folder you want will only appear in this list when you hold the option key). You should see the CloudDocs folder in there.


Can't believe this is an issue that has persisted throughout the OS X upgrades over the past three years. I spent 10 hours on the phone with Apple trying to solve this, finally found this thread and fixed it in less than 30 seconds.

189 replies

Nov 13, 2014 4:21 PM in response to kevinifly6

After having this problem since iOS 8 /iCloud Drive was released, I found that the solution proposed by kevinifly6 worked for me. It seems like it is older types of files, perhaps from previous iterations of Pages, that are "clogging up" the system. So going to >System Preferences>iCloud>Manage. Select Pages (and/or Numbers, or Keynote) did it for me.


Note that I unfortunately didn't have the intricate backup system that kevinifly6 had, so first I went through the time-consuming process of downloading ALL my Pages files from iCloud.com. It was time-consuming because many of these files (I have about 500 in there) would at first download only unreadable files (those ending in .pages-tef when downloaded). For those, I had to go back and open them in iCloud.com and in some cases make a small change to get them to 'update' in the cloud. After that, the vast majority would download correctly. There were a couple files that I could no longer correctly download or open in ANY form, but this happened with only a very select few.


After downloading all my files and making sure they weren't unopenable .pages-tef files, I did the resetting of files described above. Files immediately disappeared in Pages across my devices and in iCloud.com. I then started re-adding the hundreds of downloaded Pages files back in, and they fortunately began appearing and working across my devices again!


Note that I had previously tried ALL other ways I know of to reset iWork/iCloud Drive and none of the worked. This included deleting and redownloading all iWork apps across iOS and Mac devices; turning iCloud Drive off and on, turning each iWork application off and on in iCloud Drive, resetting all settings on iOS devices; and even deleting all documents from within iCloud.com (a good chunk of them gave me an 'error' message that the server couldn't be contacted and then the deleted documents just reappeared). In other words is the ONLY thing that worked for me was >System Preferences>iCloud>Manage


This isn't to say that all problems have been solved, as documents still often decide to upload or download slowly at random times, and I still get too many freezes of all the iWork apps on iOS devices. But it's a **** of a lot better than what it was, and at least I can now semi-reliably work on iWork documents across my multiple Macs and iOS devices. I can't believe Apple has so utterly failed at all of this.

Nov 17, 2014 12:05 AM in response to Doren_Sean_Michael

I have the same problem with OS X not syncing with iCloud. iPhone and iPad work fine. The specific errors I get in the console are:


bird: zone creation error: <CKError 0x7fea6126b2b0: "Partial Failure" (2/1011); "Failed to modify some record zones"; partial errors: {

com.apple.TextEdit:__defaultOwner__ = <CKError 0x7fea6125a360: "Network Failure" (4/-1); "unknown error">

}>

cloudd: Error fetching database URL from the server: Error Domain=NSURLErrorDomain Code=-1 "unknown error" UserInfo=0x7f8cc2d6dd50 {NSErrorFailingURLKey=https://setup.icloud.com/setup/ck/v1/ckAppInit?container=com.apple.clouddocs, NSLocalizedDescription=unknown error, NSErrorFailingURLStringKey=https://setup.icloud.com/setup/ck/v1/ckAppInit?container=com.apple.clouddocs}


I've tried the workarounds posted so far. I've tried signing in and out of my account multiple times. Multiple reboots. Different networks. Nothing works.


I've also tried signing in with another apple ID and found that syncing does not work with that account either, even though it is working fine on another machine.


I've tried creating a new user account on my machine and signing in with my apple ID and it does work over there. So there is obviously something wrong with my primary account. I've cleared out a heap of preferences and caches and tried copying things from the good account, but nothing is working. I'd prefer to not setup a brand new account, but that's looking like the best option at the moment.

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.

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.

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.

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...

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)...

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iCloud Drive not syncing locally

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