iCloud Drive Sync Problems on Mac OS X Yosemite

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iCloud Drive Sync Problems on Mac OS X Yosemite

Hello all,

I have been having issues with my iCloud drive for many months with slow syncing and documents being outdated. Typically a restart would solve the problem but it seems that it has gotten worse lately. Especially after purchasing the 20GB plan and starting its use heavily for work and personal.

The problem seems to be sporadic where the Sync takes several hours to complete. I am not sure what's the best way to identify the progress of the Sync, but I know that some of my files are out of date when I get home after working on them all day in the Office. I have been trying to solve this problem by restarting my laptop or iMac once, twice, and three times until the bars show up and the sync actually starts. If I don't force the sync by restarting the documents are never updated.

This morning, it has got really bad and I ended up signing out of my iCloud on my MacBook Pro, restarted, and then logged in again to iCloud drive. Its been hours and only a portion of the documents have been synced, the rest are basically stuck...I am not sure whats the best way to debug this problem and fix it.

I have gone through the basic debugging steps, so checking that I have the right ID, restarted the Mac, etc are all tried and many times. I need a serious set of steps to debug this problem. I am a fairly accomplished power user and have been using Macs since the late 80s.

Thanks for the help.

Posted on Apr 4, 2015 8:49 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

Fadi Hindi Author

Level 1

2 points

Apr 17, 2015 6:27 AM in response to Fadi Hindi

HI all,

No responses from anyone so far! This issue continues to persist and I have to reboot 2 or 3 times for the sync to kick-off. There has to be some solution for this problem, its beginning to look like Microsoft Windows now....that's really bad.

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Answer 2

antifree

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0 points

Apr 17, 2015 7:56 AM in response to Fadi Hindi

i too have this problem when i tried to sync my mac with icloud drive

mac tries to automatically download my backup files on icloud drive

but it stops altogether and restarts constantly

especially in case of files that goes over 100mb, it's nearly impossible to get access to it

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Answer 3

Fadi Hindi Author

Level 1

2 points

Apr 17, 2015 8:08 AM in response to antifree

Thank you for replying - I was worried that I am the only one that is having this problem! Its persistent, I have to reboot 2-3 times for the Sync to start. This has been confirmed today. Its happening on my Macbook Pro and sometimes on my iMac.

I assume you can see your files by logging into iCloud through a browser? And you can probably download the files as well, right?

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Answer 4

Fadi Hindi Author

Level 1

2 points

Apr 19, 2015 5:12 AM in response to Fadi Hindi

Hi,

My problem continues with no solution - I narrowed down the issue to the following:

1) When I open the lid of my MacBook Pro and go to iCloud, the cloud icon with a down arrow appears on all the new files that need to be synced

2) The files never download or update

3) Performing 2 or 3 restarts kicks the sync process off

Interestingly, on my work MacBook Pro and my iMac this issue doesn't exist. So it seems there os something on my MacBook pro that is causing the sync to get stuck.

Any ideas what to check?

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Answer 5

tr2000

Level 1

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Aug 13, 2015 5:59 AM in response to Fadi Hindi

I have a similar, but slightly different problem - I backup to my OneDrive folder on my local Mac using CrashPlan. This has created a number of large files in multiple directories. There is about 230GB of data to sync, the largest file is approx 1.2GB with lots of smaller files, some on 29 bytes.

The problem is this:

Irrespective of whether I sync using wireless of cable (directly plugged into my ASDL router), the internet slows, almost stops, for all users of the router. Activity monitor doesn't show any particular issues - OK the network traffic moves between 500k and 8G download (download bandwidth tested to 35Gb) and around 200k upload (upload speed tested at 1.3Gbps); CPU for OneDrive process about 50%; memory use minimal; Disk access normal (it's reading and writing MB of info, but not a bottleneck.

So - why does OneDrive cause (what seems to me like) the router to be swamped?

Has anyone looked into this?

Thanks

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Answer 6

tagni

Level 1

4 points

Sep 24, 2015 4:55 AM in response to Fadi Hindi

I've been having a big problem with syncing notes across my Idevices. I was on the phone with a ICloud support specialist for several hours and the last stage was to re-intall my OS.

None of that works. For now, I'm just syncing with my google notes until this gets resolved. there is an issue, but I think the engineers at apple must take a look at this. I suppose if the people keep complaining, they'll consider this a priority.

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Answer 7

Jakeindc

Level 1

5 points

Sep 24, 2015 3:55 PM in response to tagni

I've found iCloud syncing to be very poor. Small size documents can sometimes take an hour to sync. NOTHING with sync from iMovie or GarageBand even though its enabled. Photo syncing can be painfully slow. I've turned off iCloud and back on several times to see if restarting everything helps but no luck. I'm still using DropBox as my primary until iCloud works reliably

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Answer 8

baardbi

Level 1

4 points

Mar 29, 2016 12:24 PM in response to Fadi Hindi

I am also having this issue. I reinstalled OS X El Capitan yesterday. I have 480 GB of data on iCloud Drive. I was hoping that it would sync to my Macbook Pro in a day or two. After two days it doesn't seem like it has synced anything. After closer inspection it seems like it syncs like crazy for a period, and after an hour or two it seems like it restarts the sync. I have a folder with many large ISO files, and I'm starting to wonder if these files are causing the crash. I absolutely love my Apple products. But when it comes to iCloud Drive, it's no doubt there is a lot of work to do before it is 100% reliable. iCloud Drive is also missing a real progress indicator like DropBox has. I'm starting to regret moving from DropBox to iCloud Drive.

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