iCloud Not Syncing

Not syncing

Had some issues with iCloud not syncing where certain folders weren’t syncing correctly. I only noticed this because the cloud icon was unbroken. Hovering over the icon it says waiting to update. Bit of a weird one but left it for a while and no progress.

Suggested fixes

Most of the fixes suggest logging out of iCloud but I wanted to try a few things before doing that because this actually poses some issues. If you log out of iCloud, your Mac will want to push everything to the cloud before disconnecting you and if it can’t it will push everything to an archive folder. If I can’t upload the files, then they are all going to get archived off so this is my last resort.

Touch

First attempt at fixing was to run the linux command “touch”. This effectively adjusts the meta of the file thus making iCloud believe the file has been adjusted. Since this is for multiple files I needed to set up a recursive command. In finder, find the folder you wish to run this against and right click to select “New Terminal at Folder” which will open a terminal window within that folder.

If you then run the following command;

find . -print -exec touch {} \;

This command finds all files recursively and then passes each one to the exec command. All the files will get an adjusted modified datetime and this may result in iCloud waking up. For me though, this didn’t work.

Permissions

Turns out the folders I had moved into iCloud had permission issues and so my account didn’t have access to upload them. This was fixed by right clicking on the offending folder, selecting get info. At the bottom of the page is a padlock, unlock this and reset permissions by simply selecting apply to enclosed items;

Problem solved! iCloud magically kicked in and everything then proceeded to upload!

Thanks!

If you made it all the way down here, thanks for reading my post and enjoy your day. If you have any comments or suggestions, please leave them below...

#mtfbwy