Exploring and testing iCloud Drive using Cirrus 1.6

One of the commonest complaints among Mac users is of iCloud Drive problems – documents which take forever to sync, or have been ‘evicted’ into the cloud when you need to access them locally, then simply won’t download.

Over a year ago, I offered the first beta-release of my free utility Cirrus, which offers a bit more in the way of diagnostics and controls than the alternative of turning it off and on again. Cirrus gives you control over which files and folders are evicted into cloud-only storage, and which are also stored locally. It gives you the ability to browse the files and folders in your iCloud Drive without forcing their download, so you can check their status and more. It also provides a simple upload test, which you can perform and then inspect selected entries in the unified log to aid in diagnosis of problems. And sometimes just performing that test seems to ‘unstick’ your iCloud Drive anyway.

iCloud is often one of the more turbulent features during macOS beta-testing, and Catalina has been no exception to that. Some early bugs caused major disruption to many Macs, and it has taken me several sessions to finally restore order to iCloud Drive. Trying to use the last release of Cirrus on Catalina is doomed to several failures, largely because local paths have all changed at least twice, so far.

While I was trying to address those issues, I also discovered a bug in the current release of Cirrus which prevented its standard upload test from working at all. In order to fix this as quickly as possible, I have accelerated work on the next version of Cirrus, which I am now releasing as a strongly recommended update for all users.

This new release includes the following:

fixes the bug which prevented the upload test from uploading anything (a deep blush for that one!);
adds menu commands with shortcuts to run the upload test and clean up afterwards, accessible from anywhere within the app;
fixes changed paths in Catalina to ensure that all (I hope) app features now work in Catalina beta 5 and 6 too;
constrains the shortest path permitted in the Browser window to prevent possible crashes;
further tidying of windows, menus, and updating of the lengthy and detailed Help book and PDF documentation.

Cirrus version 1.6 is now available from here: cirrus16
from Downloads above, from its own Product Page, and of course through its auto-update system.

7Comments

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1

Fred K on August 20, 2019 at 1:19 pm

Look forward to trying this, thank you!

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2

Valdo on August 22, 2019 at 5:49 am

The iCloud Drive has some serious issues also in Mojave. Some apps not associated to iCloud create own folders when are opened. For clarification an example. Opening a .txt file with Text Edit is fine, but starting the Text Edit app alone creates a folder in iCloud Drive…

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- 3
  
  hoakley on August 22, 2019 at 6:24 am
  
  Thanks.
  That’s a feature: sandboxed apps which are iCloud-enabled do this automatically, so they have an iCloud Drive folder in which to save your documents. It clutters up your iCloud Drive, but doesn’t do any harm. If you try deleting the folders, they only come back again.
  Imagine what fun it was in the early Catalina beta which had an iCloud bug, so it kept creating more and more, TextEdit, TextEdit 1, TextEdit 2…!
  Howard.
  
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4

Valdo on August 22, 2019 at 10:27 am

Thank you very much for explanation Howard! After more as one decade with Mac’s I just started to use iCloud, so I’m a novice in this.

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- 5
  
  hoakley on August 22, 2019 at 7:18 pm
  
  You might find it helpful to click on the Mac Problems menu item at the top, and scroll down until you find the section on iCloud – there are a lot of articles which you may find of value there.
  Howard.
  
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6

PJ on August 23, 2019 at 9:03 pm

Was wondering if you can point me in the right direction for trouble-shooting. On my MacBook Pro, I have the Optimize Mac Storage (OMS) box ticked. Per the linked image below, little cloud symbols appear next to various folders and files. This is what I expect.

On my iMac, however, I have the OMS box unticked. I was expecting a full copy of my iCloud Drive files to be automatically stored on my local hard drive. But this is not happening. Still see little cloud symbols.

FYI both Mac’s are running macOS Mojave 10.14. And I am signed into both Mac’s with the same Apple ID. Thanks.

Image: https://www.dropbox.com/s/80k5e27gcyxfjym/iCloud%20Drive.png?dl=0

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- 7
  
  hoakley on August 23, 2019 at 9:14 pm
  
  Thank you.
  This is exactly what I use Cirrus and Bailiff for. Yes, logic would say all those files should be downloaded to your iMac. But they aren’t. So use Cirrus or Bailiff to bring them down to it. Simply selecting each in the Open File dialog in Cirrus is normally sufficient to prompt macOS to bring them to local storage.
  I don’t know why iCloud Drive (mis)behaves in this way, but here’s the workaround.
  Howard.
  
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