If iCloud was not so baked into the OS I suspect very few would use it. It is just not great as a cloud service.
I have had the notes sync issue several times. Yesterday I had a short video I had taken on my phone that I wanted transferred onto my mac mini.The video was taken in the morning and by 8 at night it still had not transferred so I had to air drop it. Lot of little little things, and occasionally some catastrophic things - but my experience has been there is always some little issue.
Apparently he described them as a feature and not a product
https://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/why-dropbox-founders-said-no-steve-jobs.html
It’s hard for any of us on the outside to accurately judge. I’ve found iCloud to be rock solid for almost everything. When I have had hiccups they’re usually temporary and resolve within a few hours. Obviously that’s not everyone’s experience. I often use my extended family as a gauge and I’ve heard few to no complaints. The only issue I’m aware of recently is reminders not syncing for one person. But it’s all anecdotal because none of us work at Apple with inside stats on the actual trustworthiness of the service.
In any case, considering the scope of what iCloud is used for, from storage and sync of files and photos to back-up of devices to app settings/data, email, etc, I’m actually really impressed. Practically EVERY app I use is using iCloud. I can’t recall the last time I had a problem. And I would add that when I’ve set-up new devices: iPhone, iPad, Mac that set-up is basically just log in to iCloud. Download the apps I know I use, adjust settings for iCloud and then go walk the dogs. 45 minutes later and my new device is well on its way to having everything I need.
My only real complaint is that I wish Apple provided more purchase options. At the moment I’m good at 250GB but would pay for 500GB if they offered it. But I definitely don’t need 1TB.
I loved Dropbox back in the day when there were so many iOS text editors that Brett Terpstra had to make a large shared spreadsheet just to keep track of them all. Dropbox was the glue that held my Mac, iPad, and iPhone together. Guido Van Rossum had a hit on on his hands with Python as the engine at the heart of Dropbox. At some point, podcasters began bad-mouthing Dropbox as too heavy and intrusive on the Mac. Eventually the MPU guys pronounced iCloud good enough to use and I switched. 
I contact Apple or Adobe or AT&T for help as a last resort since I know it’s going to drag on for FAR too long and may not even result in an answer – while I wade through their suggested “solutions” that actually have nothing to do with my issue (The focus on large companies starting with an “A” is coincidental – they just happen to be that last three support cases I’ve entered in).
I have a current issue with Backblaze that I was initially unhappy about, but after dealing with their support help for a few days I’m no longer unhappy about it. They’re communicating on-point, with explanations and tools so that I can help them solve the problem. In many cases I’m less concerned with the actual problem, but with how easy it is to get approriate help. I wish more companies made this a priority.
All my iOS & iPadOS devices sync with iCloud just fine (regardless if it’s iCloud Drive or CloudKit in apps) but my iMac has been having issues syncing with iCloud Drive for years and nothing helps.
It works for a while, then it gets stuck syncing a mysterious 32-byte file forever, blocking any further uploads or downloads, making iCloud Drive pretty much useless if one expects to have files in sync and readily available across devices. At this point nothing works, neither files in iCloud Drive get synced, nor can I count on Ulysses and other apps that use iCloud to update properly.
killall bird sometimes helps, but only a reboot resolves the issue, often for just about a day.
I just don’t hope any more that Apple will ever fix this mess that is iCloud.
Luxury! I’ve detailed my experiences elsewhere, but 48 hours would have been a HUGE improvement for me. A big chunk of my 843 days was waiting on a fix to ship* but there was a heck of a lot of waiting on Senior Advisors to call and often they’d have no real news.
I did get one Senior Advisor who was actually good at his job and cared about the outcome. He used to conspire with me to formulate responses to Engineering such that they actually had to do meaningful work to answer questions. In my limited experience, the Aussie senior advisors are a lot more effective than those in other parts of the world. Perhaps because they’re willing to have a real conversation rather than the guarded script reading I often get.
*This was the worst part. After I got to the “known problem, a fix will be delivered at some time in the future and we cannot tell you when nor even after it has happened” I still had one heck of a wait. I have recorded the releases that came after then that did not fix it…
11.3, 11.3.1, 11.4, 11.5, 11.5.1, 11.5.2, 11.6, 11.6.1, 12.0, 12.0.1, 12.1, 12.2, and 12.2.1
I’m sure Apple have their reasons, but I think Joz or whoever it was needs to learn what it’s like for customers and not just drive over to Craig’s house.
My experience of Apple support is similar. First level are polite and enthusiastic but just aren’t set up to deal with anything off-script, though they insist on following every step to verify that there is an issue. Senior support people vary but generally try very hard to pin down the issue and pick up quickly if you know what you are talking about.
It’s quite obvious that there is a huge disconnect between support (in my case based in Cork, Ireland) and “engineering” (in Cupertino). I’ve had senior support people read out the response they’ve received from engineering to see if it means anything to me, either. (Usually on the lines of “requires an engineering response, has been escalated within engineering, will take weeks to months”) There’s no concept from engineering that there are real people trying to get systems they need working again but unable to because Apple are the problem and won’t even tell them what is being done to solve their issue.
It’s by far the worst aspect of dealing with Apple and is becoming more and more important as Apple becomes more of a service company - if your hardware breaks or your OS goes horribly wrong, in the last resort you replace or reinstall, but that’s simply not possible when you have no access at all to what needs to be fixed and have to wait “weeks to months” for an engineer to do something that s/he isn’t willing to talk about. You don’t even know if you are in a huge queue for something that takes seconds, or if there is a lot of work involved in the fix.
These are exactly the types of issues that I find with iCloud Drive, but fortunately the killall bird gymnastics tend to solve it.
I get that Apple tech support can be a mixed bag, and a huge time-suck at worst.
The reason I asked about this is because your problem sounds to me like some sort of database corruption. I’ve had it happen to one of my clients. The only fix is to contact Apple to get them to press the magic button that either erases the corrupted cache or sets everything back to zero so you can repopulate that part of iCloud again.
The trick is getting to a person who can press the magic button. For my client, this was not an engineering problem because it wasn’t a weird bug. It was just messed up data, and apparently there was a fix that was accessible to a more senior level of tech support. I was on the phone with Apple for my client, and perhaps because I spoke knowledgeably about the problem (and convinced them that we had a good backup of all the data), they were willing to erase everything and set it back to zero.
(Of course, this was a few years ago, and things may have changed.)
Apple’s got a Magic Button? They should put that in the App Store. I sure a lot of die hard iCloud users would pay $9.99 a month for one of those. 
The “Magic Button” that was offered to me was an “iCloud reset”. Thereafter followed a back-and-forth exchange between me and Engineering (via SA, of course) to understand exactly what an iCloud reset is.
Short answer — even Engineering don’t know. Let alone how to back up what they do know about. For instance, Apple Maps uses iCloud. Any idea how to backup your content (Guides, favourites etc, I guess, but they could not tell me exactly what!) from Apple Maps?
Did you know Messages uses iCloud Drive? It stores attachments in there. How does one back up those? What about Home, Game Center, Siri, Keychain, Find My, Fitness, or Watch? All of these and more (can, and by default do) use iCloud.
They may as well call it “Life reset”.
I have used Dropbox for years, twice tried to change to iCloud Drive without success, initial upload of files stalled and took days and continual waiting for sync to finish when I finally managed to get things uploaded, and I quickly gave up
On the basis of this thread (perversely) I decided to give it another go. I have now copied all Dropbox files to iCloud which this time happened very quickly and with no stalling. This time I copied the files in groups.
I really only use Dropbox as a backup now, I now work almost exclusively on my MacBook Air M2 docked to a 34" monitor, I do not use Apple Notes and the third party apps seem to sync perfectly (Drafts, Noteplan etc) so as long as iCloud sync works (even with delay) it would seem to be good and I can drop a 19.99 a month Dropbox family sub for a 2.99 iCloud one.
I plan to run the two in tandem for 3 weeks and then hopefully convert Dropbox to a free tier.
IMO the problem isn’t backing up iCloud data. AFAIK most/all of it is in our Library folders. The problem is restoring it.
I know there is a folder named Messages that contains an Attachments folder. I’ve copied images from it in the past. And I know where Keychains and Apple Notes reside. But I have no clue where the majority of iCloud data resides. Without a “how to” from Apple I would have no chance of knowing which files and databases, etc. to restore from backup.
Restoring my entire user account to a time before the problem occurred and losing all changes since that date isn’t an acceptable solution so I use iCloud as little as possible and never for critical data.
I’m using iCloud with my Macbooks and iPhones since it was introduced. I like it and besides some hickups it works flawlessly. I’m not using it with a ton of apps, I try to use almost only native Apple apps. Besides some minimal stuff like Soulver sheets I only use it for Photo sharing with my wife.
BUT:
I also used iCloud on Windows and THIS was whole another story. It never worked as intended and caused problems on both my iPhone and my Macbook.
I guess if you are using iCloud with simple data you won’t have a lot of problems but anything out of the box or too big will cause issues.
The thing is: Besides Dropbox I couldn’t find any good cloud without flaws: Onedrive is much worse in my experience and Google Drive isn’t intended for this stuff. It is slow and doesn’t sync automatically all the time causing version problems and all.
Nextcloud should be great but I haven’t tried it yet.
Not really. Are you sure that iCloud hasn’t "optimized’ your disk space when you perform a backup? I don’t have the “optimize disk usage” settings and I can see some of the files disappear -but available from iCloud- because, who knows.
Pretty sure, but only because I have a decades long habit of checking logs and testing backups. When it comes to iCloud it’s definitely YMMV. If someone tells me iCloud works perfectly, I’ll believe them. And if you were to tell me it renames all your files on the third Thursday of each month, I’d believe you too. It’s a black box, none of us knows exactly how it works.
When a user’s files reside only in iCloud they don’t get backed up by Backblaze, etc. So Apple is not doing anyone any favors by surreptitiously turning on “Store in iCloud” from time to time with their updates. I first noticed this in 2016 or so when my executive reported some of her files were missing. They did it to me again with the macOS 13.4 update.
I just checked and would you believe it? “Optimise Mac Storage” is turned on again!!!
There is an argument that not being able to restore from a backup means you don’t have a backup.
And, publicly at least, you’ve given me more information than Apple Engineering know about! Some of the responses contained phrases like “we hadn’t thought of that” or “that’s a good question”. I’d have thought if this iCloud reset was a thing they were offering quite quickly in the process, then it would be a known quantity. Apparently not.
It appears to be a random problem, I have a Mac mini, MacBook Pro, iPad mini, iPad 12.9 inch and a PC connecting to iCloud.
The one case that I have noticed is when I was trying to organize large number of files
iCloud ended up being corrupted
