Numbers sync is utterly and totally broken

[Danfango]

Just had a minor disaster with Numbers, fortunately I can recover from...

I use it to run personal and business finances. Yesterday I entered a bunch of transactions on my iPhone between 10:30-13:30. Confirmed it pushed it to iCloud. Today I opened it up on my iPad and they are all gone. The spreadsheet checkpoint time was the date and time I opened it on my iPad on all devices. Literally the copy that was on my iPad trashed the uploaded copy from my iPhone losing about 35 entries. Nothing in revert to on the mac at all.

Opened icloud web UI on line and looked at previous versions and the copy committed at 13:35 yesterday is complete and correct. The iPad copy overwrote it entirely at 09:47 today.

What a crappy sync algorithm this is. Fortunately I understand enough about how this works to be able to recover from it but at no point the software should behave like this.

Argh!

 

[NoBoMac]

Minor nit: I'd say iCloud in general instead of Numbers.

Yeah, I too see this type of behavior all too often, file/data created/modified on one device, sync to other devices stalls out. iCloud drive and Notes being biggies for me of late.

Due to state of things re: iCloud, maybe an Automation to backup the file(s) occasionally? Once an hour, say, copy the modified files to "On My" or some other cloud service? I'm doing that with Notes app (every two hours, save a copy of modified notes to my Dropbox account).

Or a Shortcut to prompt for the information and create a CSV file with a timestamp in the name, that way won't wipe out THE copy of the spreadsheet if sync failed.

Yeah, I know, why should someone need to jump through hoops, it should "just work", but can take steps to protect against the points of potential failure when it's critical data/info.