Using Affinity with iCloud

[Gianni Becattini]

After having exploited this forum an unspecified number of times, I will try to make a very small contribution of my own in this case. Over the last few years I have been using the Affinity Suite very intensively and I think I can say that:

• The reliability of Affinity programs has improved a lot, and there are a few cases of recurring or random problems I could list;
• iCloud has also been improved in some way;
• In my experience, the stories about problems related to Affinity in conjunction with iCloud are just the last chance to justify a problem when we have no other idea...

To use iCloud reliably, however, you need to follow a few rules:

• before turning off your Mac (or putting it to sleep), always make sure that iCloud has finished syncing (the small round checkbox in the left panel of the Finder near "iCloud Drive" must be checked);
• before you start working on another Mac, make sure again that this checkbox is checked and that the balloon says "Just synced" or something like that;
• if the sync does not start, just create a folder on your desktop; usually the sync starts immediately; then you can discard the folder;
• in the worst case, if sync does not start within a minute, you can also try to sync photos and access iCloud on the web.
• Never manually download a file from there; always wait for the automatic sync.
• In iCloud settings, never check the "Optimize space" box. Otherwise, iCloud will remove the downloads without warning you. When Apub starts or exports, it tries to download the missing files and seems to hang. So you kill Apub, reported as "not responding", but the problem is somewhere else.

My use of Apub is not probably the best, because I directly link the AP image files, with all their layers, but I have to manage thousand of images and I could not afford converting them to flat, I am just a one man band... From another point of view, mine is a more taught test for Apub.

This is for my experience - if I wrote something wrong, I will be happy to learn.

Gianni

[MikeTO]

I agree, I use Affinity with iCloud over WiFi every day and have an issue at most once every few months. Turning off Metal helped eliminate the save failures. I recently reset Publisher which turned Metal back on and encountered a save failure not long after which I believe indicated that it's still an issue.

I use Affinity only on my MacBook Pro so I don't follow any of the rules that you suggested Gianni, I use it without thinking about it.

I do make daily backups of my work which haven't been needed in the past couple of years but backups are a good insurance policy. (And they've let me 'undo' some mistakes I've made.)