I’m not sure if this is the same issue, despite similar symptoms.
I had a very similar issue about 18 months ago, which took Apple 4 months to fix despite all available escalations, and there was never even a sliver of feedback as to the cause. I just noticed that files created anywhere in Documents (iCloud Drive enabled) or any of my iCloud folders (e.g. Pages, Numbers etc.), on any of my devices, simply stayed wherever they were. Apps and processes that used iCloud but did not directly use iCloud Drive (e.g. Photos, Calendar, Contacts and 3rd party apps like Diarly) all carried on as usual. The key piece of information was logging into iCloud.com to see that “Drive” would not allow me to view any folders at all. There was just a message saying there was an error accessing the folder and to try again later.
At no point has there been any error - or anything in the console logs.
It took about a day of being quietly and politely insistent (and wasting a lot of time on pointless level 1 procedures that I had already done) to escalate to a senior, then a week to get it escalated to engineering then NOTHING - for months despite me regularly checking in with the senior and him escalating it to his manager. Then one day everything started syncing again and a day later they were in touch to say that engineering “had done something” and checking that it was working.
It has been perfectly OK since then until I noticed that a file I created on my iPad had not synced to my Mac after several days. I checked into iCloud.com and saw that none of my Drive folders were accessible, but non-Drive iCloud is still working (including such things as backups)
This time it took only half an hour to escalate it to a senior, as the level 1 person recognised from the notes that I was describing the same thing. The senior tried a couple of things his end (“telling the account to refresh drive”), formally asked permission and read a disclaimer to give engineering permission to work on my account (and checked I had everything backed up outside iCloud) and said:
- It looks as if iCloud thinks you don’t have an account that gives you access to an iCloud Drive, but that’s obviously not the case and shouldn’t be possible.
- He had seen a few (single figures) similar examples in the last few years
- He escalated it to engineering (and talked about Cupertino)
- He said to give it a couple of weeks and he would get back to me because engineering were obliged to respond to him in 10 working days
- I missed his call (he phoned the day after we arranged and I was literally having a haircut) - currently trying to rearrange
Last time was utterly miserable. We were trying to buy a new house and I NEEDED iCloud Drive (e.g. for notes I made on site to be transferred to the Mac). The worst was simply no way of communicating with anyone to try to understand what was going on. Even the senior support people couldn’t get ANYTHING from engineering and I was not allowed to. I got a strong feeling that communication between the two was very poor.
I explained that I had local backup, so if they’d nuke my iCloud Drive and give me a blank working one, I could get it all back in a few hours. I asked them to make me a new iCloud account and let me transfer my stuff to it. All refused, but no explanation given. I didn’t even know if I was in a very long queue for a quick fix, or if it was a problem that was very hard to solve. I got to the point of sending Apple an initial formal letter to say that I thought they were infringing my statutory rights (UK law - they have to make “competent” and “reasonable” response to service issues and have to communicate to the customer to show that they are doing that - I have Apple One so have a service contract) They couldn’t have cared less: I was invited to serve a claim and given the relevant address, but told informally not to expect any response, ever. The people I dealt with were extremely helpful and the senior tech support people were impressively knowledgeable and understood instantly, but beyond them was a massive barrier, that they could not penetrate.
This time I am not so stressed. I moved all critical stuff out of iCloud Drive then and I have all the workarounds and more and more apps ignore iCloud Drive and sync their databases via iCloud instead. It’s just annoying and frustrating and makes me trust iCloud Drive even less.
Sorry that’s long. I hope it helps someone
