GarageBand SAYS it saves or exports files to iCloud, but it DOESN'T

Not really a question, but a further warning to iOS Garageband users who care about your work. As partially indicated in my last post, Garageband randomly deletes work, and even when you have work it didn’t delete, there is no guarantee that you will ever be able to get it out of garageband… IE, if you ever want to play it for anyone, you’ll have to play it in GarageBand.

I’ve been trying for hours to get my projects copied out of iOS GarageBand before it decides to randomly delete even more of them. So I turn on iCloud saving, and save all my projects to iCloud.

Come back the next day and look at iCloud from my Mac and, SURPRISE! The files aren’t there. Go back and look at GarageBand on iOS, and it says they’re saved on iCloud. But it’s just a lie, they’re not there, no other device sees them there.

So, I used “export” instead, and exported them as GarageBand’s .band files for import into my OS X GarageBand. It says it exported them. iCloud Drive on that iPad says they’re there. So, you’d think that means they’re there, right?

No, of course not. It’s another lie. So, both the “save to iCloud” and “export to iCloud” functions are just fake. I know they work sometimes, because some files from a few months ago ARE there. But nothing from the last 2 weeks are there, including recent changes to older files. The files on iCloud are still the old versions.

So I’m sunk. Weeks of work is trapped in iOS GarageBand, the additional work I was going to do on them to finish them on my laptop is impossible because Apple claims to include features that don’t actually work.

So I figured the least I could do is warn others. I would recommend that you do NOT trust this app for working on music that you care about or might later want to export to finish in a real music program, it could easily be “trapped” in iOS or even completely deleted, no matter how carefully or frequently you save your work. This app lies to you about saving and exporting your files, period.