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Can't open any iCloud documents on mac

Hi.

About a week ago, I moved about 10GB of my working documents onto iCloud from Google Drive. All was fine for a while.


Today, I can't open any document into any program. I get a pop up error that says "The document “(null)” could not be opened."


I was able to download what I needed from iCloud.com, so the documents are there.


How do I fix this and keep it from happening again?


Saul

MacBook Air, OS X Mavericks (10.9.2)

Posted on Oct 21, 2015 10:50 AM

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Question marked as Best reply

Posted on Dec 9, 2017 1:22 AM

Read somewhere that in order to get access to iCloud stored material that is inaccessible, one must first to Empty Trash!?!

In my case, that worked.


APPLE, PLEASE ADD AN ICON OR NOTE WITH THIS INFO ON THE ICLOUD WINDOW AS A REMINDER. THANKS.

32 replies

May 11, 2016 7:13 AM in response to mikeandmill5

I am running the latest versions of El Capitan, iOS 9, updated Pages, Numbers, etc.


I cannot open any document stored in iCloud from my Mac. They open fine in a web browser, iPhone, etc.


Last night I tried disabling / re-enabling iCloud on my Mac. It re-downloaded everything, but I still had the same problem. Nothing will open.


Logging out of my user account on the Mac or rebooting seems to be the only thing that temporarily fixes this problem. It is so annoying.


I found this in a different thread but I have not tried it yet so I can't verify if it works or not..




Step-by-step:

1. renamed .numbers-tef file to .pdf;

2. control cliked - then - Show Package Contents

3. double clicked index.xml.gz - index.xml has been created!

4. renamed back .pdf to .numbers

5. double cliked file and Bingo! Numbers opened the file.

May 13, 2016 11:53 AM in response to elbenoit

I spent a lot of time digging into this as it is extremely annoying when this problem occurs, but in the end I have found that a simple reboot will solve this problem and allow access to the iCloud drive files and they can then be opened from the Mac OS Pages, Numbers, Preview, etc..


I wish I could come up with a permanent solution as this is obviously not how it's supposed to work.


Good luck and thank you for your courage.

Jun 1, 2016 11:48 AM in response to siisaul

I have exactly the same issue. Unable to open MS Office, Numbers, Pages and other "office files" stored in iCloud from my MBP (OS X 10.11.5).


Works fine to open from iPhone and web. Not possible to copy the file to a local disk, but I can mail the file to myself, open it and then save it back to iCloud (overwriting the existing file).


Have not tried rebooting the machine, but if this is the best solution to get this working, I will cancel my iCloud subscription and revert back to Dropbox, a solution that works perfectly flawless.

Aug 8, 2016 6:18 PM in response to siisaul

I have the same issue, but I use iCloud on one device only so it's no sync-problem (MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Late 2013), 10.11.6 (15G31))

And actually I can open the files with an application that is not an Apple one.


For example, happens a lot with TextEdit files (plain and simple .txt): whenever I cannot open them, I open with Brackets, no issue.

Can't open any iCloud documents on mac

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