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Worst. Beta. Ever.

Well - I guess I am in the "Hey it's a Beta" Camp

I like the fact that Apple offers a beta so I can evaluate it before I jump into the next MacOS - always on a separate external drive (SSD) and always careful about iCloud because it can sync problems as well as files.

That said I am impressed with Catalina so far (As a beta OS) and don't really have any iCloud issues (so far) weather it be with mail, files etc (I don't use iCloud for Photos or Music in any way)

I use iCloud heavily for iMessages, Keynote presentations, important excel worksheets and have added my test drive to iCloud after beta 5 - not one file missing after adding Catalina to my Apple ID

When I travel - my Catalina drive is off line - when I am not - I have local back ups (have not needed them so far)

I can certainly think of worse OS introductions - OSX 10.0 comes to mind when I Paid for an OS that did not work with any software for almost 1 year ! - and well there was Windows Vista !

Everything in perspective
 
As others have noted, my iCloud on this beta is borked. Fortunately for me it isn’t iCloud that is borked, it is this beta. And I’ve now switched to my MacBook that isn’t on the beta.
My Air will sit unused until the next beta update which will hopefully be more useful. As it is, this beta is unusable for me.
 
JungleNYC said:
I've been doing this for over a decade. Never seen anything this bad.

And it's BAD.

iCloud is a complete garbage fire. And everything that touches it is affected, including non seed machines, and causing major problems on devices running older OS versions.

I got Photos "uploading" 500gb from every damn device, for some dumb reason. Files not syncing. Mail all screwed up. Messages and Notes all wonky. Music is a glitch-fest. Rinse, repeat.

And now EVERYTHING has vanished from my iCloud Drive and Desktop. Poof!

Seriously. WTH?
Click to expand...

I agree. Especially the iCloud is a f***king mess.
 
I just downloaded all of my important school files from iCloud.com just in case "worst comes to worst". The last thing I want is for iCloud to look at my Mac and I think I deleted the files myself, and thus, deletes it everywhere else.

Don't restart your computer either, it makes it worse. Now I cannot even access my iCloud Drive at all on my Mac. Apple Support is useless when it comes to this issue (although I did tell I was on Mojave because I didn't want them to dismiss the problem immediately if I told them it was the beta).

I'm surprised it didn't fix itself. The same thing happened on my iPhone and it fixed itself within a day.

It's too bad that this happened on Labor Day Weekend, because it's going to take a while for a fixed update to come out.

EDIT: Also, nice Simpsons reference in your title ;)
 
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I stopped testing after DP5 and honestly I didn’t have any serious issues. Everything worked fine, except that Photos would crash once in a while when rendering a slideshow. Mail was fine, iCloud was fine, etc...

Did it all go south after DP5 or was I just lucky?
 
I think the major point is that we’re so close to the release (unless they don’t make the right decision to postpone it a bit) and still there are some pretty serious bugs which weren’t fix for the duration of the beta testing program.
 
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Is it really that bad? No miracle happens overnight so I'm concerned about the polish of the catalina at release compared to mojave. I don't think there's any real pressure on apple to release catalina alongside the new mac pro so postponing the release by a few months to get it right sounds right.
 
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Forgive me if I am mistaken but is everything in iCloud Drive deleted for OP? I just installed whatever the newest beta is from the Dos dude tool on a Mid-2010 Unibody MacBook I got at a garage sale the other day to have a go with it and have not linked any iCloud stuff yet, and now probably won't. I would find it strange that things would get totally deleted though. Isn't that the point of the cloud?
 
vaugha said:
Is it really that bad? No miracle happens overnight so I'm concerned about the polish of the catalina at release compared to mojave. I don't think there's any real pressure on apple to release catalina alongside the new mac pro so postponing the release by a few months to get it right sounds right.
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Sidecar is a big ipados 13 / Catalina feature. It won’t work without both oses being updated.
 
These reports are quite accurate. I can't figure out what happened in iCloud and it propogated to all my non-test machines. It's a dumpster fire.

I have so many versions of "recovered files" I don't know what is what.

It's literally not been this bad in a decade.

EDIT - Update

On a Mojave machine I had a shortcut in my dock to most of my current Numbers/Pages docs. They were still there, however I could not actually use the finder to see them. They're hidden somehow, where Numbers & Pages could see them, but the Finder can't. I managed to copy them to a new folder off the root of my icloud drive. Mojave can see them. iOS 13.1 can see them (and edit them, and they sync). iCloud.com can see them and open them. Beta Icloud.com can also see and work on them.

ONLY Catalina latest beta can't. So it's really screwed up.
 
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Also been getting frequent failure of input devices on waking from sleep, one that pops up the bluetooth wizard and you have to hard reset.

(To the tune of The Best Day Ever)

It's the worst beta evvveeeeeeerr!
 
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T-Bob said:
Also been getting frequent failure of input devices on waking from sleep, one that pops up the bluetooth wizard and you have to hard reset.

(To the tune of The Best Day Ever)

It's the worst beta evvveeeeeeerr!
Click to expand...
Stories like this makes me want to just windows 10 on my MacBook Pro and leave mac OS X behind.
 
Yeah I am not having near the issues being chatted about here.
I am running Cat on 4 machines since release, all on iCloud, they've definitely had bugs here and there but nothing that makes me think "worst ever" in any way shape or form.

Good luck peoples.
 
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Wreckus said:
Stories like this makes me want to just windows 10 on my MacBook Pro and leave mac OS X behind.
Click to expand...

Since this post I've actually had no more of those problems, just stopped happening for some reason.

Not the first time I've seen it either, remember occasionally seeing it some time ago but just never multiple times over several days (that I recall).
 
Man. Apple has a lot of coding to do in the next few weeks lol. That’s alot of pressure to put on all your teams. I can’t see everything becoming stable until beginning of November. Like all the OS’s etc.
 
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