iCloud Drive uploading everything... again

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iCloud Drive uploading everything... again

Hey there,

Since I've installed the macOS 12.5 update, my 2021 M1 MBP started running weird: 5 minutes to show the menu bar after a restart, crashes when it runs for a long time...

Yesterday, I realized that iCloud Drive was reuploading... everything from my document folder... I noticed it when it had still 750k files to upload...

24h later, there are still 630k files to upload. While it's doing this crazy upload, I can't work on anything, as I can't even copy a file locally (it gets stuck). My MBP isn't up to date with the latest changes I made on my other Mac.

I have to restart the bird service every 1-2h or the whole upload gets stuck and doesn't progress anymore...

How can I speed up this upload or cancel it, and what could be the reason for this massive reupload?

During the time I wrote this post, it only uploaded 500 files or less.

PS: I've seen other reports for this problem, here or and reddit, but there was absolutely no solution. I tried to turn off and on iCloud Drive, but it just started the upload again from where it stopped. I tried restarting my MBP multiple times, tried to let it awake for the night... Nothing works.

PS2: My MBP is always connected to internet when I use it, whether it's at work, at home or using network sharing on the move. At the moment, it's connected on a 300Mbps download / 200 Mbps upload network

Posted on Aug 29, 2022 2:00 AM

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Answer 1

Aug 29, 2022 11:47 PM in response to BananasSplitter

I'll post here an update, just in case someone faces the same problem.

I've tried many methods and found a way to speed up the upload... just to see it starting again everytime it hits 0.

The problem was that even if I turned off iCloud Drive, it would keep an Archive of the un-uploaded files (aka everything) in my home folder and instantly try to upload them when I turned iCloud Drive on again.

What I did to solve this:

Fully disable iCloud Drive
Chose "Delete everything from my Mac" (this will keep an archive of any file not fully uploaded to iCloud Drive)
Once iCloud Drive was disabled: move the Archive folder to an external drive, to ensure I could find back any files that would be missing on my iCloud
Turn on iCloud Drive again

This will result in setting up a clean installation of iCloud Drive, without endless upload starting. It took a while though to download back everything I needed, but I ended up moving some files out of iCloud as they probably were messing with it (I add some old dev projects still loaded up, with git enabled, which is the worst thing to do on iCloud Drive).

The only reason I allowed myself to do this is that I knew I didn't update any important files on my Mac since it started to act weird (with Monterey 12.5). If you worked on an important project while you encountered this upload problem, be sure to back up all important files, just in case.

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iCloud Drive uploading everything... again

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