I accidentally clicked the cloud icon in a file dialogue, and now macOS has started to sync that entire folder. With only 272 GB free space and the sync wants to download more than that, means this will end in chaos… It has happened before, and it will happen again.
Is there a way to stop that current sync process? I don’t want to turn off iCloud Drive (as the internet suggest when googling this), only stop the current process.
Restart doesn’t help. The only thing that help, AFAIR, is to turn off iCloud sync and then on again. But that will take a week or so.
BTW; This is one of those times when an Apple engineer clearly didn’t bother to think things through at all.
However, I disagree with your opinion about iCloud. It’s a great solution when it works – I have everything available on all my devices with no hassle, for example.
It’s just that it needs more and better controls for the user…
I have restarted several times, doesn’t effect the syncing process.
Eventually I came up with the idea to reinstall macOS. “Maybe the sync process will stop then!?”
First it wasn’t possible due to limited space. After cleaning up some stuff I tried again – Didn’t work due to an unknown error.
I’m on Tahoe beta, so it may be due to “whatever”.
However, I did a “Free up Purgeable space” with CleanMyMac X and got 200 GB more space.
At the moment iCloud have been syncing 8,8 MB for 30 minutes. Its bedtime for me now, so I’ll see how it looks tomorrow.
As I said, I love iCloud Drive when it works (which it has done for me for many years now). When it doesn’t, I hate Apple and wish they could give us more control, and speedier sync! Really, how hard can it be?!
Yep, tried that to. Got a message at top in all Finder windows that “iCloud sync is paused”, and it started again when reconnecting.
New macOS beta release this morning, have just installed it. Syncing continues…
As I mentioned, iCloud Drive have worked very well for me recent years. But I did this dance 8 years or so ago. This is really one area that can be improved. It’s not just that it’s extremely slow from time to time, the user have no control at all what is going on.
And this particular problem (accidentally clicking the download icon for a large folder) must happen thousands of times every day around the world.
The solution is to just wait it through. Will probably take a couple of days, I’m glad I could release some space. But things are slower than normal, especially when dealing with files.
Yes, this has happened to me several times but the folder was not big enough to make me worried to be out of disk space. iCloud Drive is a black box, when it doesn’t behave as expected you can only wait it out.
I guess you could use some of the tools from Eclectic Light Company, but this is pretty technical and may or may not work and of course Apple should provide a friendlier way of doing this.
To play Devil’s advocate on this from Apple’s perspective with some insider knowledge of working for a SaaS company.
Thousands of times a day is nothing to Apple at their scale
Of those thousands of times, many misclicks will be a small download
The impact will not be destructive in the majority of cases (although I’ll agree that it’s inconvenient).
And finally, Apple never seems to consider that people may be on slow or metered connections, they assume always on fast connectivity. Having said that those people are unlikely to use iCloud unless they need to.
So why would Apple spend any time on this as it doesn’t generate them any revenue directly or indirectly? (I’m not saying that they’re right)
I have no idea what is going on with iCloud Drive right now b/c files are taking a day to sync from one Mac to another. I moved these files over to iCloud last night and they are just now appearing.
IMO, iCloud issues have little or nothing to do with Macs, iPhones, and iPads. I don’t use it for data storage and my files upload/download as fast as my network allows.
I managed Linux servers for several years. It’s a rock solid OS.
It usually uploads and downloads seamlessly but I guess it is my network which is a headache/wormhole I don’t want to dive into.
Thanks for the note on Linux!!! I bought a bunch of material to learn about it before diving into the project and I am shocked at awesome information I am learning. It is the best way so far for me to learn about how operating systems work.
bird, cloudd, fileproviderd processes when killed will start again automatically and if they get to spin up the CPU again, you need to determine what they are stuck on. There is no single “this is how you do it” method, there are a few tools involved, most start with BRCTL in the terminal.
To determining what bird does, in a terminal type:
brctl log -w -s
This should give you the files it is processing, if it is eating up CPU, most likely you will the same dang file(s) being processed over and over again. You will need to move these files out the iCloud environment (at least temporarily) and kill bird/fileproviderd etc run the brctl command again to figure out if you got it all.
There is a sync database that may need to be removed and things can get a bit technical. Usually that means most folks avoid digging in but rather feel like putting their fist through the monitor - I’ve been there myself. However, I recommend you start a Claude.ai or chatgpt session and simply tell it what you see. It will give you terminal commands, execute these, capture some of the output and paste it back and let it do the analysis. If you don’t trust the commands, just type them with --help or similar argument and read up what it does. And no, don’t do an “rm -rf”.
I find that Claude (most of my experience is with this llm) is very good at resolving these issues with iCloud syncing but I expect chatgpt to do equally well.
It has happened before, and it will happen again.
