Ask HN: Did macOS Sonoma break your iCloud setup? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Did macOS Sonoma break your iCloud setup?

2 pointsreimertz4 comments

I have a pretty delicate setup where I symlink into my iCloud Drive folder to keep documents, .dot-files etc. synced between my devices, using .nosync folder extension to ignore folders such at git projects etc.

I stupidly updated to Sonoma without doing a backup and now, nothing works. I cannot even copy files between folders.

All I get is

  The operation can’t be completed because one or more required items can’t be found. (Error code -43)

And the more I've read about this, it seems Sonoma is a nightmare for a lot of people. People loosing years of work just by updating.

Anyone else having these issues?

Some references:

  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255162138

  https://discussions.apple.com/thread/255183704

  https://eclecticlight.co/2023/10/25/macos-sonoma-has-changed-icloud-drive-radically/

Nope, the upgrade was pretty seamless and uneventful, thankfully.

I do use iCloud Drive within the intended purposes as described by Apple. I wouldn't use it for situations Apple does not explicitly support -- at least not without 3-2-1 style backups.

A warning, not an admonishment: Use Apple services in a novel or unsupported manner and you're asking for trouble.

For synchronizing dotfiles, certain app settings and such, I use Syncthing.

> A warning, not an admonishment: Use Apple services in a novel or unsupported manner and you're asking for trouble.

+1

I've always had sync issues with iCloud Drive when storing developer projects and related things there. It ends up stuck or confused or conflicted but tries to resolve the merge conflicts opaquely and it's hard to know there's a problem in real time vs until later when you find something broken. I keep all dev things out of iCloud after getting burned by this enough times over the years.

To OP: Consider a repo dotfiles setup like using Chezmoi or similar. Transitioning to it was less friction than I expected and the only downside really is having to remember to commit changes across devices.

https://github.com/twpayne/chezmoi

I use iCloud more as an archive where I put things I am not actively working on. I didn't encounter any issues with Sonoma but I believe your use case is a lot more advanced.

Sonoma has been trouble free for me, but I'm not doing anything weird with iCloud Drive.

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