iCloud Drive for Windows - Veeeeeery slow sync

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Level 1

21 points

iCloud Drive for Windows - Veeeeeery slow sync

I've been waiting over a week for one of my Windows 10 PCs to finish syncing with iCloud Drive. It took a week for the iCloud Drive notification in the system tray to actually show me how many files it's downloading. Now that I can see how many files are being downloaded (by watching the number drop), it looks like it downloads anywhere from a few to a hundred in minutes, and then it seems to stop for hours. I've verified that I have the latest software from Apple, and I've tried rebooting a few times over the past two weeks to see if that helps. (It never does.)

Here are some of the recommendations I've seen concerning this:

Update OS - Checked. Up-to-date.

Set Apple software update to "daily" - Done, but s/w was already current

Check internet service speed - 100 Mb down, 20 up (every time)

Set up an app specific password - Not doing this. I have way too many passwords already. If someone can provide some empirical data to sway me, I'll give it a try, but there's no reason why this should be necessary.

Ideas, anyone?

null-OTHER, Windows 10, iCloud Drive

Posted on Feb 19, 2018 2:32 PM

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Answer 1

Mar 4, 2018 6:40 AM in response to jermicidal

Yep the service seems kinda broken on some devices, especially on Windows. I am confident that one year from now / after some updates it will be working fine, but in the meantime it is not a carefree cross-platform solution. Which is what I need. Fortunately there are alternatives, and compartmentalising data and services is not the worst idea 🙂

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Answer 2

Feb 28, 2018 1:03 PM in response to jermicidal

I have a very similar problem. iCloudDrive (latest version on latest Windows) has so far downloaded 300 MB of 30 GB. It took about four (sic!) weeks for that. I had a long chat with support who promised to get back to me after talking to developers. I'll wait for his response, but am very close to cutting down my iCloud storage in favor of something else, if there is no immediate solution.

My mac and idevices sync just fine over the same broadband connection.

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Answer 3

Mar 6, 2018 1:00 AM in response to jermicidal

I have been waiting for three weeks now. No more. Moving on to a cloud service for grown-ups.

Apple support, as heartwarming the first two sessions were, failed to get back with a solution within a reasonable timeframe. So I am solving this myself by moving all files that I need across macOS and Windows to pCloud.

Cheers, M

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Answer 4

Apr 3, 2018 3:47 AM in response to jermicidal

One more follow up on that topic, right after the update of iCloud Drive for Windows to version 7.4. Well, it still slow and unusable. As disappointing as this is, the Apple guy who first escalated the case and promised to look into a solution, including a chat with the devs, did never call back. He didn't even bother replying to my mails. Yeah it's one dude, but that still makes me question the brand, which I have been supporting for two decades.

Fortunately there are other players on the market. Adobe provides my new photo cloud with Lightroom CC, and pCloud has servers in Switzerland, claims to be zero-knowledge, has a few more plans than Dropbox and has proven so far to be one of the best cloud services I have encountered.

I am still keeping my MacBook Pro, it is a decent machine I paid a fortune for, but, sorry to say, the serious part of my work is happening outside of Apple's realm now.

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Answer 5

jermicidal Author

Level 1

21 points

Feb 28, 2018 3:22 PM in response to Marin De Sign

Yep. That’s exactly how everything behaves for me. The majority of the 88000 files are between one and ten MB. If I check the staging folder for iCloud Drive (in the app data folder), there will sometimes be a BIN file in this size range, so I’m assuming it’s packaging the files one at a time like this as it downloads them. It seems to download/upload small files first, which makes this extra frustrating to monitor. It’s taking forever to download all of these small files, and hasn’t even started the large ones, so it’s at about 100 GB of about 775 GB. 32000 files to go.

I wrote directly to Apple Support about this, and never received a response. So far, the client has been downloading for at least 19 days. No other cloud storage solution behaves this badly, but I’m already paying for the space for iPhone backups. I don’t want to pay for another service on top of it.

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iCloud Drive for Windows - Veeeeeery slow sync

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