Cloudy with a Chance of Insanity: Unsticking iCloud Drive | Hacker News Reader

Cloudy with a Chance of Insanity: Unsticking iCloud Drive

tidbits.com

63 pointsfoliveira23 comments

I’ve given up on using iCloud Drive, despite having Apple everything, because I find the sync so unreliable and undebuggable. I never had any issues like this with OneDrive or Dropbox.

Really? I have had horrible issues on OneDrive if my connection is bad. Including extremely frustrating things like reverting files to older versions and completely deleting all of my local work. Admittedly, that was ~3 years ago before I switched to GDrive.

Same. Things just... don't sync. Not after a minute, not after an hour. But then 2 days later the files pop up.

And then on Tuesday it all works instantaneously and perfectly.

But then Wednesday it stops entirely again.

It honestly baffles me, what possible architecture choice could explain its erratic behavior.

And it baffles me just as much that they've never fixed it.

Whereas Dropbox and Google Drive for Desktop have always worked great.

I found OneDrive would crash a lot amd couldn’t deal with file names that weren’t valid windows file names.

The google drive for Mac crashes a lot, and no matter how I adjust the settings often refuses to download the full remote system unless I click on the cloud icon next to the file name. They really want you to use a web browser, which I don’t like to do (prefer native apps, thanks).

Dropbox seems to have gotten it right, it seems. I guess that’s why they’re still in business even though their business is built around a feature, not otherwise a product.

> Dropbox seems to have gotten it right, it seems. I guess that’s why they’re still in business even though their business is built around a feature, not otherwise a product.

That criticism never made sense to me, especially from Steve Jobs, as a moderate sized team putting their all into an excellent product will be competitive against a larger team putting in a half-hearted effort. As he himself demonstrated.

I don’t know about Steve Jobs and iCloud, but Dropbox is the kind of thing that can become table stakes, requiring a large surface of interface (esp relative to its core functionality) vs someone else fitting it into their existing infrastructure (e.g. authentication and other tools). That’s basically the definition of a feature.

They only survive at all bc so many competitive alternatives can’t be bothered to invest in doing a good job.

Like I said a moderate sized team putting their all, going above and beyond, etc..., however you want to phrase it, will be competitive even against a much bigger company putting in a half-hearted effort.

Of course if they slip and only start putting in a 1.5x effort or something then they won't be competitive.

Excel pivot tables won’t work if the file banner is invalid in Windows, too. This happens a lot for me when I open an Excel attachment, because macOS will put brackets in the file name.

From the comments on the article:

"The issue for me was that the Safari iCloud interface would balk at files larger than 10 GB even though the iCloud handles files up to 50 GB."

Wow. Those are ridiculous limitations.

Might be browser limitations? Firefox for instance only allows you to store 10GB of data per eTLD + 1. How would the web interface work with files greater than that?

> killall bird

As mentioned in the article this is a helpful command, I use it a couple times a week whenever iCloud syncing is stuck (sadly).

It is believed that Apple hasn’t gotten Cloud and Social right yet. Remember they tried multiple times with Music Sharing, Find My your friends, Share directly to Twitter, Facebook, etc.

Like the author, I have Dropbox besides iCloud. However, iCloud is an Apple thing — share/backup/store settings, preferences, temporary edits/work, and share with families. If something is essential, even for Pages, Numbers, etc., I store the files in the local version synced to the cloud (Dropbox for personal/family and Google for work).

I haven’t faced the problems people keep mentioning on the Internet, so I stay cautious enough. However, it has been my pattern for a while — Own your content and use everything else as tools[1].

I manually back up Photos every month. I need to find a simple way to automate backing up the photos, contacts, etc., and keep a copy in Open formats.

iCloud is convenient and works as long as we stick to Apple’s prescribed lane. However, try to have a way to walk out if the need arises.

1. https://notes.oinam.com/digital/

“it is believed”? APNS is one of the most reliable services on the planet, serving about a billion people 24/7/365 for many years.

The whole “Apple is bad at cloud” is a meme from a decade ago. Apple is great at the bits of cloud computing that make Apple money.

Yes, absolutely. This is why I use it as a critical component of my life -- personal, work, etc. but with the idea that, “I trust everyone. I just don’t trust the devil inside them.”

I just happen to have backups to walk out and not become part of a statistics or, worse, a meme influencer.

...so I kinda had doubts about giving up on the apple stuff and moving on towards a home server with a RAID setup coupled with off-site backup.

It's a bit more work, but not _that_ much more work, and a single weird undebuggable incident can flip the entire "amount of work" calculation on its head.

Had a similar experience myself recently with migrating the whole family over to iCloud calendar and having to import thousands of calendar events from iCal files. The process hung several times, repeatedly crashed the iCloud web client and Apple L1 support, while lovely, were out of their depth.

Logging and diagnostics were minimal and it really was a black box. Smelled very much like one poorly understood/under maintained server sat somewhere that deals with calDav for web.

I suspect that the most senior engineering teams at Apple that work on this stuff are pretty lean to say the least. Imagine a few ultra 10x guys who wrote most of the sync code base and now get hardcore salary incentives to NEVER LEAVE.

I love that they named the cloud document sync daemon `bird`; people who've been using Apple's cloud services for a while may remember that MobileMe had a "Back to my Mac" feature which worked by creating a 6to4 tunnel and running the other bird daemon (BIRD Internet Routing Daemon) to manage routing. I wonder if there are any versions of macOS that ever had to have both bird daemons running at the same time?

increasingly my mac has critical issues that are undebuggable due to apple services (family sharing, etc)

For about 3 months my mac had 1second network delays when opening any new connections, but only sometimes? The console wasn't much help as the failing services were all secret apple things with error/failures but no usable logs.

good luck

>For about 3 months my mac had 1second network delays when opening any new connections, but only sometimes?

This sounds like the primary configured DNS server was unreachable, but the secondary was reachable.

Headline based on movie name

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meatba...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudy_with_a_Chance_of_Meat...

Definitely the movie name too, and assuredly not the book which came out 30 years before. (Which the movie is based on)

iCloud Drive is terrible and I’ve used it to store everything for years. I keep backups on Dropbox and. Backblaze because of how awful it can mess things up.

I had very similar issues culminating in losing a non-insignificant amount of data. Despite being locally stored on multiple computers, an issue with iCloud Drive caused it to be deleted off of all.

I’ve since moved all my data out of iCloud Drive (although I still use it for their other services like photos). I thought my case was just special but I’ve encountered similar issues helping friends/family.

It’s beyond me how they get away with people thinking it “just works” and how they can’t manage to make a simple cloud sync service.

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