Good Morning All,
I know there have been a bunch of threads over the years, but I am considering the move to iCloud Drive (again!) from DropBox… Any full time iCloud Drive users have any insight? My needs have changed and I only need a reliable place to store stuff that I can access from multiple places - I already pay for Apple One Premier …
thanks
I haven’t had any problems with iCloud Drive in years. (Knock on wood.) Burned too many times though, I still don’t trust it for anything important.
It’s been my primary cloud storage for nearly 5 years and hasn’t given me trouble. I’m only using it for personal matters. I trust that it’s secure using Advanced Data Protection, and that’s my priority. It still lacks versioning like you’d get with a high end Box account, but that’s fine for things like vet records and car maintenance documents.
I ran into some brief issues when I had my Obsidian vault on an iCloud folder and synced through Obsidian Sync service, but I’m not sure I can blame iCloud for that.
Ultimately, I’d say go for it for personal matters, but if you’re running a business or would be entrusting it with your job, I wouldn’t use it. I would want something with a file recovery mechanism and versioning.
Apple provides a mechanism to recover files that were deleted in the past 30 days.
Wow, I spoke too soon. That’s a nice addition Apple has made. It’s probably been there for a while too 
. I’ve gained a bit more trust in iCloud with this.
With certain applications doing document versioning, and provided 30 days of file recovery is sufficient, maybe iCloud Drive is sufficient for business use.
I’ve been using it daily as my primary cloud storage for the past 5ish years. It’s been rock solid for me.
I’d guess it is fine for most people, most of the time but if you are unlucky…
I went through iCloud Drive hell — Something went wrong at Apple so I didn’t have a working iCloud Drive for about 8 months in total (all the rest of iCloud carried on working perfectly: photos, music, things like Devonthink and Bear, iCloud backups, mail, contacts etc. etc.). Senior Apple support people were as frustrated as I was at the complete lack of any information or feedback and the extremely long delays after it had been “escalated to engineering” within 24 hours. In one of the regular (but not very useful) “catch up” calls with support, there was a hint that it might have to wait until Sonoma and then a very hasty denial that he had said anything of the sort. It was the usual paranoid Apple secrecy (or protection of intellectual property) in full flow.
Anyway, a few weeks after Sonoma was released (full, not beta), iCloud Drive suddenly started working for me again. It took a few weeks (literally) to fully synchronise again (I have about a terabyte in iCloud Drive) and it seemed to cycle all existing data. Some things (maybe a dozen files) would have been lost if I hadn’t had local backups (or maybe not, but I decided that I would delete a few things that still had an error after 6 weeks and restore them from backup. They’ve worked fine since)
Since then, iCloud is rock solid for me. It really does look as if Sonoma was a big update to iCloud Drive behind the scenes. I still don’t trust it, and I hate the lack of information (what has synced or not) and lack of control (not being able to set any priorities or schedules), but it works fine and is so embedded in the system that it is good to use. I go back far enough with IT (late 1970s!) to expect all tech to fail sooner or later and that I have to have a way to keep working. iCloud is good enough for me now, but I have work-arounds in place, in case. It’s impossible to know how common an experience like me is, but one senior support person told me he knew of “a literal handful” of cases across Europe.
Incidentally, under UK (and EU) consumer law, companies have to respond to problems with paid-for services (online or otherwise) as reasonably promptly as possible and they are obliged to keep the customer reasonably informed (e.g. projected time-scales, likely costs, any change in the process of repair etc.) and to offer recompense if they are unable to fix. (e.g. they have to refund if they end your service). Apple simply ignored that requirement, as far as I can see. They told me that iCloud was a “best endeavour” service, which is simply not a UK/EU concept. When I raised this with them, I was given the address to serve their lawyers (like I was going to sue Apple!)
Functionally, until iCloud offers user-controllable selective sync, it is worthless for me.
I don’t want to buy 4 TB of internal storage for every Mac I own, as there is no way to manually exclude specific folders from specific Macs, so it can’t be used if you have more in the cloud than the size of the smallest drive amongst all your Macs.
This.
You’ll probably be fine. But if you aren’t, expect pain.
Mine lasted 843 days. Can you tell that number is burned in my brain? I wrote about the saga here.
My favourite part of all that was learning that even Apple don’t know how iCloud works. Seriously.
It’s like commuting daily on a well developed city highway system but there is a small chance you will end up stranded in the middle of the Nullarbor and out of fuel.
I’m pretty sure that there are people in Apple who do know exactly how iCloud works, have a list of “known issues” and risks and probably have a comprehensive list of tips for reliability and recovery they use themselves. Part of the issue is Apple’s culture that people who know anything about anything are wrapped in such tight security that they are not allowed to share any of that knowledge with anyone else in Apple, and especially not with anyone in the support team, let alone with any customer who might really benefit from it.
At one point a senior support person told me that engineering had told him on the phone that they knew what the problem with my iCloud Drive was, but they’d used a term which was proprietary to Apple, and so he was not even allowed to tell me what it was in simple terms. I just had to accept that it was broken, that engineering was working on it and it would (at that point) take “weeks to months” for them to fix it.
I use iCloud Drive exclusively and it is rock solid. I have OneDrive and DropBox, but don’t use them. However, I use exclusively Macs, I don’t use a PC. A couple of years ago I was using iCloud Drive on a PC and it was a complete mess. Didn’t work. But on my Macs/iPad/iPhone it works perfectly.
Apple released new Windows apps for iCloud stuff recently. Still does not work great. OneDrive on the other hand works great on a Mac. So if cross platform is needed, do not use iCloud unless you are good with the web version on Windows.
Amazon, Google, Microsoft, and many other cloud providers publish Service Level Agreements which state the Uptime Percentage that they agree to provide. For example “. . . the Monthly Uptime Percentage will be at least 99.9% in any calendar month . . .”
Welcome to iCloud is the closest thing to an SLA I’ve been able to find.
iCloud reliability has been discussed here many times and has been described as everything from "rock solid’ to “can’t be trusted”. I have no reason to doubt any of these statements.
“iCloud” is a many-headed beast that has to deal globally with billions of of users, devices, and data centers. Not to mention that the basic concept of real-time sync, of great varieties of data, held globally, is hard to implement (and that is a real understatment. 
) On top of that, we all use iCloud differently, with different amounts of understanding and expectation. I’m amazed it works as well as it does.
And yet I don’t see many people complain about DropBox and OneDrive (and there are probably a lot more users of OneDrive). They both just work (but have their own issues).
I used Dropbox for years and loved it early days on Mac and iPhone (personal use) but moved to iCloud (and particularly CloudKit) as it got better and Dropbox got more intrusive on my Mac. (For example, Why so much criticism of Dropbox? - Software - MPU Talk.)
I coded, trained, and wrote documentation for software on Windows PCs and Unix backends for my entire career. And I can’t tell you how happy I was to be off the Microsoft platform since I’ve retired.
… And yet (you say) I don’t see many people complain about DropBox and OneDrive …
In my experience, iCloud Drive as a Dropbox alternative works well. I have even found that the aggressive “disk optimisation” techniques that Apple use to avoid the user to selective select which files need to be downloaded works fine with the tools I use (Finder, Obsidian, even DEVONthink is aware when a indexed folder or file is not present and requests the download). But this may vary.
I am quite happy with iCloud Drive but I suspect that Apple is using the same frameworks that have been published for File Providers on Mac land all the usual vendors (OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox) should work equally fine, UX-wise. Not so sure if they are as opaque when something goes wrong as Apple is (I have been lucky).
The only thing I dislike is that the network filesystem mount point is hidden somewhere inside $HOME/Library/MobileDocs or something like that so it’s a nuisance on the Terminal.
That wasn’t my point, I said they have their problems, but reliability is not one of them. Dropbox’s app have gone south, but the one thing I have always heard it is that it just works.
OneDrive also has it’s issues, but I have been using it on a corporate level for years (as well as on my home Macs and PCs), it has never lost a file or just stopped syncing for some mysterious reason.
And heck, iCloud has been very reliable for me for years now, but I also don’t use it for as much stuff and it is noticeably slower than OneDrive.
You mean, perhaps, “Hard for Apple”. sync has been solved by most, if not all of the other cloud service providers - Amazon, Google, IBM, Microsoft, and even Dropbox.
You are assuming an always-Internet connected user. I am often mobile at client sites for periods of time with no Internet connection - I cannot rely on a algorithm deciding which files can or cannot be available on my computer as there is no faillback when it makes the wrong choice and I have no connectivity at that time.