Currently I am facing post sync problems ( having gone through days of waiting for pie chart to complete file synchronisation- I am not brave enough to do the stuff described in the article- I let it sort itself out and it did after good 5-6 days. Now both my M1 MacBook and Mac mini both say that they are synced with iCloud but the two computers don’t show the same files! I e they are not in sync with each other. I travel with my MacBook and can’t see the files I was working on mac mini. Not so long ago they were in sync. I shut down and restarted but no luck!
icloud sync has never worked reliably. Back in the day of the then new iphone SE (original) apple actually sent me a whole new phone because notes wouldn’t sync (upgrading from a 6). That didn’t fix it, but magically my notes started syncing some weeks later. No notification of a fix from apple, I just tried it one day and voila. No apology/oops either, of course.
Years later notes still syncs only sometimes. Sometimes you have to close the app (phone or mac), sometimes typing a character into a note will force a sync, sometimes it won’t. Contacts sync is awful. Apple calendar sync has just died again for me, having worked well for years. I would NEVER even consider letting icloud sync my desktop, though I’m sure apple will turn that on for me with an update at some point and … oh dear I can’t think about it.
Trying to be sure that a file in an icloud folder is actually also local to a device is impossible, as they seem to unsync by themselves. So you can be all set to read something on a plane having checked it is there, and oopsie, its not there. Sigh.
In short, the ‘it just works’ thing is not a good model. Step 1 would be to let users ‘sync now’. Step 2 would be to stop trying to be so clever.
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Yeees … I’m very much afraid that that’s probably the point at which Apple would demur most strongly. “It just works” doesn’t, it seems, work unless you have clever people making all the important (and wrong) decisions.
The frustrating point for many with icloud (and many other apple things) is that there isn’t an instruction manual that says ‘this is how it works’.
We end up stumbling around in the dark trying to figure out why it isn’t working (is this thing not working the way I thought it would a bug or intended behaviour?). Your long list of indeed helpful suggestions is just another way of demonstrating this.
‘It just works’ is demonstrably not a thing, even if it does, because ‘works’ can mean different things to different people.
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I think you have to add sudo to the renice command. Ordinary users can only increase their “nice value” as far as I know.
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I don’t know why having two networks seemingly caused a problem. So-called multihoming is managed automatically by macOS and has been for many years. If you have multiple routes to local resources and the Internet, macOS automatically sends packets in the most efficient and best way.
I have seen problems with multihoming in the past. Several users of Indesign that I supported complained that Indesign was slow. They stored their document on a file server and the images used were also on a file server. I found out that disabling Wi-Fi was the solution. With other network problems, changing the service order in the Network system setting might help. Not with this problem.
I do experience problems with it often enough that, where possible, I generally advise avoiding multihoming on a fixed setup, because various bits of Apple’s ecosystem seem to go wrong in various inscrutible ways otherwise (Handoff, AirDrop and AirPlay have been particularly troublesome for me over the years, but I’ve also had weird issues with the Content Caching server) that were solved by only registering a single interface. You can leave Wi-Fi on and a profile for your network in your iCloud Keychain–just tell it not to auto-join the Wi-Fi network if you have a fixed connection to the network already.
But to be honest I think the general malaise is simply one of indifference by Apple to the needs of troubleshooters when things do, inevitably, go wrong. As of right now, my iCloud Tabs aren’t syncing–I don’t know how to bring them back, and increasingly, I just don’t care any more. Same with iMessage syncing. It simply isn’t working and I can’t even begin to understand why. I refuse to play a guessing game, beyond limited and relatively harmless steps of toggling off and on, and hoping and praying that somehow something that I’ve done will trigger something else into action. If it’s not reliable, I say, just avoid using it. (It is, of course, a brutal irony that this is in effect an endorsement for the use of other desktop operating systems with limited interoperability with iOS; after all, iPhones are still Apple’s biggest franchise, not Macs. It will be observed, too, that iCloud Drive first arrived on Windows, where these sorts of reports never seem to be anything like as serious …)
@glennf - One month ago I had similar sync issues between my main Mac Mini 2018 (had all the files) and MBP M1 Max (didn’t have them).
TLDR; After doing a nuke’n’pave of the MBP. I had to rename almost EVERY file in my iCloud Drive, which then made each file re-sync one file at a time.
AppleCare senior tech advised me that renaming ALL iCloud Drive files as the main solution he had found to get things working. At first I was incredulous this was even being suggested, given the time I knew would be involved by myself doing this. But after manually renaming a couple of random files across folders which worked, and knowing how much of a black box Apple’s sync services are, I resigned myself to the process just to get the job done – for all 1.5TB of data! (And yes, it took me ages: ~20 hours of work that week, so I was most certainly not a happy camper at my time being wasted to Apple’s syncing inadequacies!)
Of course I used the mass renaming feature in Finder on the MMini to simply add an ‘X’ to the end of tons of files at a time in one folder, let them all show as sync’d on the MBP, then undo (cmd-z) to unname them again on the Mini, which would sync the file name reversion back to the MBP.
The only major problem I had was when trying to rename too many files at a time via the Finder mass rename tool, it would often throw some kind of pop-up error saying something like “cannot rename at the moment - files in operation” or something. So I then had to cut the amount selected down into smaller batches; all of this therefore took about double the time it could have been completed in accordingly!
All of this was completely and utterly ridiculous of course. But as Apple users have realised by now, it’s a complete black box when things go wrong. Troubleshooting is a crap shot in the dark, so you have to jump on any solutions you can, to get things working again, and move on with actual stuff you should be doing instead.
Great article though, as ever. 
EDIT: Should add here that simply renaming a folder’s name did NOT make the files inside the folder sync. Hence each and every file being renamed.
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That sounds absolutely horrific and now I wonder why I didn’t try it. HA!
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Very interesting article. I also switched from Dropbox to iCloud a couple of years ago so I can sync all my work files (around 500 GB in total) across my desktop and laptop. And I also had some very strange non-syncing glitches and spent weeks with Apple support. I ended up finding the solution myself as part of the troubleshooting (Apple were unaware of it) - it turned out that I was placing folder aliases on my desktop for current projects, so they would appear on the desktop on both computers. And for some reason, this was causing all kinds of weird random behaviour. I removed the aliases (using the Finder sidebar instead for my current folders) and ever since then have had pretty much no syncing problems at all with iCloud. It has worked really well for a full year.
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Apparently macOS Sonoma adds to iCloud’s problems:
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I ran into this problem coincidentally right before you posted about Howard’s article. In my case, though, it has happened for a different reason.
I had set up a few accounts on my system over the past year, and I decided to get rid of them since I never used them. The system reported a problem with deleting the home folder of one of the accounts apparently because iCloud was accessing some of the files (probably syncing them). The problem now is that the rest of the account is gone from my system, so the affected files and folders have been left in a strange state which keeps iCloud from releasing them, Time Machine from running, and me from deleting them.
I’m suspecting I might have to erase the drive and reinstall the system to get Time Machine working again.
I thnk there are definitely scaling issues with iCloud. I have an iMac, iPad, and iPhone. I have always had problems with the inconsistency of iCloud tabs in Safari (sometimes they show up, sometimes they don’t, sometimes only one device out of two…). I never figured out when I closed an iCloud tab on a remote device - for example, closing an iMac tab on the iPhone - whether it was supposed to close the original tab. It never did for me.
I discovered that Tab Groups work much better. They seem to propagate almost immediately. Closing a tab on any device removed it from the group. So far, so good.
After I accumulated about 140 tabs on my iPad (I have bad habits), I decided to put them all in a tab group. The group name propagated to my other devices but none of the tabs did. The group was empty on those devices. Worse, when I tried to read one of those tabs on the iPad, it would eventually crash - close without warning. I’ve never had that problem with tabs that were not in a group. So I’ve taken to creating many smaller tab groups, but I suspect there’s also a limit to the number of tab groups one can have before things fall apart.
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It appears that comments are still open on Howard’s article. Perhaps you should post your situation and ask for his input.
I think a major issue with Apple, is that they never publish proper full software specs of most things. iCloud even more so. All they have for the whole of iCloud is this minimum requirements per feature article:
But more precise info is just not there. For example, for iCloud email (@icloud.com, me.com, mac.com email addresses), nothing whatsoever on main server specs (not what any individual mail clients can/can’t handle, but what Apple’s mail servers can/cannot do). All there is this spec page containing a few limited maximum usage specs:
Some obvious questions other providers answer, but Apple obfuscate:
- Maximum amount of folders (aka mailboxes) allowed?
- Maximum amount of characters in folder names?
- Any characters that cannot be used in folder names, apart from forward-slash (“/”)?
- What is the maximum depth of nested folders?
It just seems ludicrous that other mass email providers give such info on their email specification, but Apple keep basic stuff hidden away from their own users all the time, so users cannot make decisions on possible usage.
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And here’s a second such recent article published on The Eclectic Light Company website:
UPDATE October 30, 2023
A new Eclectic Light article that describes iCloud’s trinity of services. Towards the end this article refers to Howard’s applications that monitor synchronization.
I tried to migrate 7000+ Evernote documents to Notes. Fussed with it for days. Everything got to Mac eventually, but iOS devices would not sync. Just stopped at a certain point. I could find no info on data limits, but after escalating the issue to a level where I was supposedly talking to a Notes developer, he said, “Hm, 7000, yea that’s a lot of notes.” He wouldn’t give me any more detail, wouldn’t actually say, “That’s beyond our limit.” And had no solution to offer. I started over trying to keep my migration to under 2000. Took some patient overnight synching on the iOS devices, but it did work, and still syncs. I try to keep it under 2000. 
5 months is a terribly long time. My “stuck” iCloud problem lasted 843 days — a number burned into my brain. It also managed to leap space and time. I wrote about my saga here: My iCloud Sync Failure Saga – And now…
I apparently now have an 81K, yes 81-kilobyte, file that will not sync. For weeks. I’m just pretending I don’t see it (and I don’t know which one is the problem, of course).