iCloud drive taking FOREVER to sync.

[dannys1]

So is this just something weird happening for me, or is it a problem for everyone at the minute.

iCloud drive is taking a lifetime to sync document updates. It must be downloading and upload at about 0.1kbps!

I've just tried using handoff to open some changes from my iPhone in numbers on the Mac and its spend 12 minutes attempting to open the document so far...

Theres obviously something not right, I wondered if this was a global issue or literally just me at my place and if so, what on earth could be causing it?! I took about an hour for iCloud drive to sync the Pages/Numbers documents despite them being no more than about 3mb in total.

I've tried changing my DNS from opendns to local ISP's local DNS in case that was an issue, but no change. Finally the document just mentioned has opened in numbers, a full 13 minutes after I clicked the icon in Finder to continue editing on the Mac.

I'd suggest cache files on my Macbook etc, but my iPhone is behaving the same way. I rebooted my Airport Extreme base stations numerous times, so I can't think its that - mean while Dropbox continues to work flawlessly.

 

[dannys1]

So i've managed to get handoff between devices down to more like 1-2 minutes rather than 10-12 minutes.

Hardly the instant Craig reckons it should be.

I'll give them a week or Dropbox is getting my cash.

 

[impaler]

It's dog slow for me. I upgraded to Yosemite last night, enabled iCloud Drive and let it run. Seven hours later, after I woke up, it was still "running" in iCloud settings. However, it's enabled, as when I went to icloud.com I could get into my files.

 

[dannys1]

OK, here is THE test for people to try.

I just watched back the keynote and Craig avoided doing this, he opened the Keynote presentation from the iCloud Drive folder and he'd answered a text message in between so it had plenty of time to sync.

Readers try this...

If you try to “handoff” a document that is already synced with iCloud drive, it’ll open instantly in pages/numbers whatever, like this… https://twitter.com/MrThaiBox123/status/523117232659116032

However of you open a Pages or Numbers document, make a few edits on the iPhone, then click the handoff button in OS X, you have to wait for it to sync those updates with iCloud drive…this is where the massive delay is occurring with me. Anything between 1 and 10 minutes...

 

[satcomer]

I am starting to think Apple is having another MoblieMe issue with the mad rush to use it.

 

[dannys1]

I am starting to think Apple is having another MoblieMe issue with the mad rush to use it.

I'm hoping its the mad rush.

Handover isn't paticuarly reliable either.

Was working fine, went out for the evening came home, doesn't work when I arrive back. To get it going I had to open bluetooth on the iPhone and then share something from the Mac to the iPhone first for it to work in the other direction again.

It seems that Mac to iPhone is much more reliable than the other way around, and if your iPhone to Mac doesn't work, you can "get it started by sharing from Mac first"

Not exactly a case of "it just works" though is it. I expect to get in, arrive at my computer and finish off something I have on my phone...isn't that the point? I shouldn't have to be refreshing bluetooth and wifi.

On the same note, airdrop seems to not find my phone half the time either - when it works its fast and flawless, but then often it sees no device to share to?!

 

[Alrescha]

It takes less than 20 seconds for a document that I edit on my iPad to be updated in the Open menu on my Mac.

A.

Addendum: I think it actually takes a couple of seconds more if I use Handoff, perhaps because Handoff has to initiate the save as well as the fetch.

 

[dannys1]

It takes less than 20 seconds for a document that I edit on my iPad to be updated in the Open menu on my Mac.

A.

Addendum: I think it actually takes a couple of seconds more if I use Handoff, perhaps because Handoff has to initiate the save as well as the fetch.

I wish this was the case for me - but it's taking anything from a minute to 5 minutes (or sometimes not at all) to transfer a file from one to other.

What I don't understand is, for hand off to work we have to be on the same wifi network - why then if we make an edit on a file which isn't synced to iCloud are uploaded (at what must be about 0.1kbps with my results) and then downloaded again at the other end, why isn't it just sent over wifi ala air drop instantly and the syncing handled in the background.

So far I'm not impressed at all though, iCloud Drive is very basic lacking 5-6 key Dropbox features but most of all a bit dumb (does it even do LAN syncing like Dropbox does?) i'd questing if it's doing incremental updates too, which Dropbox does, if I change 1kb it updates 1kb of a 300kb file, iCloud Drive seems to just resync the entire thing.

Handoff isn't reliable, Airdrop neither, and iCloud Drive reminds me of the speeds iDisk was.

 

[redpandadev]

As of this writing, I have been waiting 4 hours for my iCloud drive to sync. The initial "Setting up iCloud drive" took about 30 minutes. After that step finished, I had what appeared to be an empty folder in the Finder. Now that it is approximately 4 hrs later, I have a handful of folders and files that have populated. Many, many more to go...

I used Yosemite during the beta period and did not have this problem at all. I'm thinking it is a server-side issue that will resolve itself once the initial upgrade demand quiets down in a day or two. You definitely are not alone!

 

[redpandadev]

Update

UPDATE: it magically started working fast and efficiently. Issue solved itself.

 

[dannys1]

UPDATE: it magically started working fast and efficiently. Issue solved itself.

I'm going to give it a week and see if things improve, i'll let them off that everyones might be syncing at once - but in my experience every internet service Apple has done has been slow. Even iTunes match can take an age to start streaming tracks.

I'll wait to see if 8.1 stabilises Handoff some what, when it works its great, in fact this morning I woke up, moved to have my breakfast, open my laptop and it instantly saw I had messages open on phone and let me open the app (note it doesn't' send a half written message across though which would be ideal)

If it doesn't work no biggie, it is only one click to open messages on Mac anyway.

Ultimately I just found it weird that Craig never demonstrated my test above. He specifically avoided that. Also I noticed that you can't do Handoff with files that are not on iCloud Drive, so forget it just being bluetooth/wifi, as soon as you open a numbers file stored in Dropbox or on your hard drive it won't Handoff - which is a shame as I was hoping Dropbox might sync a lot quicker.

I'm presuming the above means we'll never have handoff for things like Evernote either.

 

[dannys1]

Just tired hand off this morning, deleted 3 letters on a numbers document, swiped it up on the phone...its been loading it for 3 minutes so far...

I just don't get it, this should be instant, it should be less than a few bytes of incremental update to the file.

If you have to save the file and have it fully synced for it to be quick, then you might as well just open it manually on whatever device you're working on - surely the point of Handoff is it should be super quick and slick.

I think i'll have to do a Youtube video of this.

 

[Chairman.Jobbie]

I'm having the same problem. iCloud sync doesn't work for me at the moment. It worked yesterday or the day before but now documents updated on my iPhone don't update on my iPad. It's annoying cos I'm starting to think I should have done a clean install in my iPhone 6+ instead of migrating everything from my iPhone 5... But I shouldn't have too.

I hope it's sorts it self out on Monday with iOS 8.1. The only app that syncs immediately (that I use) is apple notes. I've moved to that (it's quite good) for some of my notes, especially since this problem affects all my other iCloud syncing apps.

Wish there was an easy way to reset iCloud in case there is some kind of glitch. But if a few people are having a problem it must be apples back end...

 

[dannys1]

Ok, its not just me, finally got a friend to confirm the EXACT same symptoms as me.

If you open an iWork document, make a change to it, then try to handoff its going to take AGES to copy it to the new device.

Pretty pathetic really

 

[Chairman.Jobbie]

I've update both my devices with ios 8.1 and iCloud is syncing in all apps at the moment (wasn't before) and reasonably fast/instant.. Hope it stays that way. Did a quick check of handoff and it sort of worked abut then hung on iPhone trying to open the app an eventually opened.. But the icon in the corner was there so it knew I was working on it on my iPad.

Hope it don't glitch again otherwise I'll turn off all iCloud and do everything on iPhone 6+ and just use my iPad as a consumption only.

 

[dannys1]

Well i've just done the same test with 8.1 and exactly the same, Pages just stuck on "opening" an ONE word document. So you can sack of iWork for handoff it doesn't work, at least the phone features are useful.

 

[border terrier]

I'm seeing very slow syncing and compared to dropbox it's rubbish. When I save a doc it can take several minutes to properly sync especially larger files of 8mb. Dropbox has no such issues. I'm over a 72mb connection via ethernet and no issues with network. Seems even slower over wifi.

I'm going to move back to dropbox pretty sharpish if this doesn't improve.

 

[dannys1]

I'm seeing very slow syncing and compared to dropbox it's rubbish. When I save a doc it can take several minutes to properly sync especially larger files of 8mb. Dropbox has no such issues. I'm over a 72mb connection via ethernet and no issues with network. Seems even slower over wifi.

I'm going to move back to dropbox pretty sharpish if this doesn't improve.

Yeah, I wish I hadn't titled the thread on this as I have as it was more about Handoff, but I created a new thread detailed this huge bug in iWork handoff that seemingly no one cares about!

But yeah general sync speed is awful compared to Dropbox, which is exactly how it was in the old iDisk days, unusable.

 

[cmaus]

Drive is not working for me - when I turn on iCloud Drive, nothing happens.
I only see a bunch of error messages produced by bird and cloudd in the Console.

 

[pbmcp]

iCloud Drive is so far horrible for me

upgraded all my devices (mbp, iPad, iPhone) on Monday. It is now Thursday in Aus and it still isn't working for me.

only Keynote has been able to sync between all three.

It took a day and a half until I could see anything in iCloud Drive through finder. And now I still don't have all the folders.

Pages and Number on iPad and iPhone still show all the documents with the upward arrow (I assume meaning trying to upload/sync).

Online in iCloud it just gets worse.

In iCloud Drive I get a message... "There was a problem loading the content of this folder. Try opening the folder again later."

In Pages/numbers/keynote beta I get the message... "uh oh! something went wrong. we couldn't upgrade your iCloud drive for some reason. Please try again later."

Seems like it may be still trying to sync, but if anyone has any solutions or speed up options, I would love to hear them.

*** PS the devices below are no longer the one I use

 

[RonPriest]

iCloud Drive is another epic FAIL by Apple in an attempt to provide any reasonably dependable cloud syncing services, go figure! Last month when Yosemite was released, I signed up for 300 gb of storage and added 70+ GB to my iCloud Drive folder which I just wanted to keep synced between 2 Macs. It took forever to sync, as a matter if fact, Im not sure it EVER did fully sync. I have Xfinity (Comcast) as my ISP and as most are aware, they have a 300 GB a month Bandwidth limit. I have never exceded it, and normally do go over 200 GB a month (and I don't use Netflix or any other streaming/download movie services). I started getting warning from Comcast that I was reaching my limit and then i went over my limit, and eventually by the end of the month, I used over 800 GB of bandwidth. Then, 2 days into the new month, I had used over 50% of my monthly limit, Im like WTF! I decided to turn off iCloud drive and the problem was resolved. So I decided stop syncing that 70+ GB of data, move my data to a different drive/folder and deleted it from my iClould drive in Finder thinking it was gone but no! It's still on the cloud. Anytime I turn on iCloud Drive back on it wants to eat up my bandwidth again and start syncing that data. I finally just had to turn off iCloud Drive on all of my computers/devices and contacted Apple. They couldn't even delete the files on the cloud. They put my account in troubleshooting mode and it's been almost 2 weeks now and Im still waiting for them to fix this issue. At this point I just what them to delete those documents so I can turn iCloud Drive back on so the applications that use iCloud Drive can sync its data, but at this point in time, I can't use those applications because I can't turn iCloud Drive back on, not if I want any bandwidth left for the rest of the month. Im so dissipointed in Apple, they have totally screwed up with iCloud Drive! What a shame, I really thought they would get it right this time, but they just can't seem to get a clue how to make this service work. Maybe they need to buy DropBox and or SugarSync so they will have someone smart enough to fix it!

 

[thegrants82]

iCloud Drive is another epic FAIL by Apple in an attempt to provide any reasonably dependable cloud syncing services, go figure! Last month when Yosemite was released, I signed up for 300 gb of storage and added 70+ GB to my iCloud Drive folder which I just wanted to keep synced between 2 Macs. It took forever to sync, as a matter if fact, Im not sure it EVER did fully sync. I have Xfinity (Comcast) as my ISP and as most are aware, they have a 300 GB a month Bandwidth limit. I have never exceded it, and normally do go over 200 GB a month (and I don't use Netflix or any other streaming/download movie services). I started getting warning from Comcast that I was reaching my limit and then i went over my limit, and eventually by the end of the month, I used over 800 GB of bandwidth. Then, 2 days into the new month, I had used over 50% of my monthly limit, Im like WTF! I decided to turn off iCloud drive and the problem was resolved. So I decided stop syncing that 70+ GB of data, move my data to a different drive/folder and deleted it from my iClould drive in Finder thinking it was gone but no! It's still on the cloud. Anytime I turn on iCloud Drive back on it wants to eat up my bandwidth again and start syncing that data. I finally just had to turn off iCloud Drive on all of my computers/devices and contacted Apple. They couldn't even delete the files on the cloud. They put my account in troubleshooting mode and it's been almost 2 weeks now and Im still waiting for them to fix this issue. At this point I just what them to delete those documents so I can turn iCloud Drive back on so the applications that use iCloud Drive can sync its data, but at this point in time, I can't use those applications because I can't turn iCloud Drive back on, not if I want any bandwidth left for the rest of the month. Im so dissipointed in Apple, they have totally screwed up with iCloud Drive! What a shame, I really thought they would get it right this time, but they just can't seem to get a clue how to make this service work. Maybe they need to buy DropBox and or SugarSync so they will have someone smart enough to fix it!

That's too bad. My iCloud Drive hasn't had any of the issues that yours does. I cancelled my Dropbox and am very happy.

 

[mithok]

It's dog slow for me. I upgraded to Yosemite last night, enabled iCloud Drive and let it run. Seven hours later, after I woke up, it was still "running" in iCloud settings. However, it's enabled, as when I went to icloud.com I could get into my files.

Here it is two years later and it still takes over an hour for a second laptop to access files uploaded to iCloud drive from another laptop

 

[BichoWicho]

That's too bad. My iCloud Drive hasn't had any of the issues that yours does. I cancelled my Dropbox and am very happy.

I recently switched from Dropbox, which used to sync between mac and PC lightning fast, to Icloud just last week and I've had the exact same experience as Dannys1 - 10Kb changes are taking about 10minutes + over a strong ethernet connection! It's a real shame because I want to use the apple software that I got with my new macbook, but it's just dismal compared to Dropbox and others...

 

[Zaino]

I try to open a file in icloud.com and i receive this message. ' there was a problem loading content of this folder'

any solution ?