Apple tech support for iCloud is pretty terrible.
One of their common troubleshooting step is to sign out of iCloud and then sign back in, the 2nd Level support person didn’t even understand but that would force archive copy of the iCloud Drive and then begin downloading the iCloud files again and when you have Close to 2 TB of data in iCloud that will take quite a while and if you don’t move the archive copy off of the system drive you’ll end up filling it up and your machine will become unusable.
I was aware of this because that’s what happened to me, I had to restore from my Backup to get the machine back up and running.
Apple said that they could provide a backup of the iCloud drives from the server and sent me 20 zip files that had other zip files inside of them with no way to expand them so that I could get my iCloud drive back, even Engineering can’t explain how to fully get the files out.
Absolutely useless.
Apple News + has a Macworld article about how unreliable iCloud is.
After signing out of iCloud and signing back in again, I’ve left my machine on for eight days and it has still not fully synced. I have a 2 gb internet connection, a M1 MacBook Pro w 32 Gb of storage and a 2Tb drive.
I have optimize iCloud turned off. But right now I do not have any known good copy of all of my files.
Many of the files and folder, show uploading and downloading.
So in summary, no restorable backup from Apple available, files not syncing, tech-support not very helpful, No one taking responsibility for this problem.
I have had five calls with Apple over the last several months and after doing some troubleshooting we had to reschedule a call to continue, we made an appointment but I never received a call back from Apple. I don’t think any other service provider could get by with not keeping their appointments.
Not sure of the plan forward, when you feel like you’re walking across the pond with ice Regarding your data still being there.
Is dropbox for Reliable?
Should I just move all of the iCloud files to my Nas and just keep the bare minimum and iCloud. Of course, the challenge would be sinking them to always have always have the latest copy of the file.
When it works, iCloud is awesome I like being able to move between the different devices and have everything available, except when it’s not available.
I actually had a 2nd Level engineer say that when you make a lot of changes all at once in iCloud, it can get confused. I have just started noticing that I have about 150 files w 0 file size.
I regularly copied the iCloud drives files onto an external Drive and probably have 3 to 4 TB of copies but I am not sure which ones are most complete.
Any advice.
Do I start killing the bird (see above Macworld link)
Right now I’m totally demoralized as I have been resting with this issue for about nine months now.