iCloud Drive just accomplice or a murder?

[Gianni Becattini]

Yesterday was terrible for me and for more than 40 times I had to kill the stuck Affinity Publisher (mainly when I synced settings or cross references across a book).

But I strongly believe that this time AP is only partially guilty, or completely innocent. The Public Danger N.1 is, in this case iCloud Drive.

First: it made a sync error that I am not able to explain. I closed my work at office, switched my home computer on, waited to be sure that the sync was completed and noted some strange behaviour in the file dates/times. I checked tho other computer, noting that it had not finished the sync. I waited, and I could see the new files to be synced to the old date. 6 work hours lost. I am sure I made no mistakes (no save) but it happened. However, I think it is only a sporadic event, and this is not my caveat here.

Second: I could understand that, when you have less free space on your HD (120G in my case), iCloud starts to "optimise" a lot of files, removing them from the disk and leaving them in the cloud. It should do that with files that are not accessed since long time, but it is not so (at least in Sonoma). So AP tries to download a file that it needs and waits... if the files are many and large, you think it is stuck and you kill it. Maybe that all is working perfectly, then iCloud changes the situation under its feet, and, a little later, what before was going well is stuck now. I could prove it in almost two cases.

You can inhibit this behaviour switching off the iCloud Drive optimisation, but in this way you loose the possibility to remove the download for the folders that you want to keep only on iCloud.

I appreciated very much the new suggestive animated backgrounds... and also the new merry emoticons in the latest version of MacOS.... but from time to time they should also try to fix the old pitfalls of a service that you, in addition, pay each month for, and which always used to generate troubles since many years.

All that to warn other unlucky users or to be warned if my conclusions were wrong.