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Lisat78

macrumors regular
Original poster
Jun 5, 2015
102
55
I got my base MBA m1 yesterday and set everything up—or so I thought. All my folders downloaded from iCloud, Dropbox etc, I updated to the latest version of Big Sur, and went to bed with the machine plugged in, to allow it to finish doing whatever.

Then came to it this evening to do some work, and was confronted by ‘iCloud is not switched on’ or similar message. I re-enabled it, and ... nothing. Only three folders have downloaded; a shared folder, a Numbers folder (with two documents in it; this has 20 or so docs) and a Pages folder that’s empty (again, this has a LOT of documents). Checked with iCloud.com—all my folders etc are there as expected. Ditto on my iPad Pro. Ditto on my 2013 MBP (still on Mojave, btw).

I signed out of iCloud and back in again; same thing, only those 3 folders appeared. Note that originally I had enabled ‘optimise storage for my mac’, but disabled when the trouble started. Then I went to my home folder, and all the missing iCloud folders and files are there in an ‘iCloud archive’ folder—presumably as a result of signing out of iCloud.

Is this a Big Sur issue? iCloud was working as expected during my initial setup, which was done before updating the OS. Will it resolve over the next day or so? Thankfully the archive IS there, so my files are accessible, but it’s very irritating.
 
Can you confirm the missing folders are present elsewhere like at iCloud.com or in the Files App on your iPhone or iPad?
 
I did that, and they were fine in both places. However, in the time since posting this all my folders have reappeared under iCloud in Finder! It does make me nervous though, in case it happens again. There’s also a whacking great 90GB archive sitting there that’s eating up a good chunk of my precious 256gb SSD space. Hopefully I can persuade my old 2TB drive to work and offload it, at least it’ll give me a backup if nothing else!
 
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I’ve been going thru all of my iCloud folders in Finder on my MBP in preparation for my new M1 MBP and have found a number of folders just sitting idle with no changes happening will flip to “waiting to upload” instead of showing the item count. Like it’s reconciling in the background. At times there’s the little progress window showing it’s uploading GB’s of data.. I’ve read that if you modify a file it’ll force it to update in iCloud and then you should be fine. I’ve ended up cleaning things up and zipping some folders. Everything’s been fine for me now for a few days. But it sounds like others are having odd iCloud related issues, too. Hopefully gets addressed sooner than later.
 
I’ve been going thru all of my iCloud folders in Finder on my MBP in preparation for my new M1 MBP and have found a number of folders just sitting idle with no changes happening will flip to “waiting to upload” instead of showing the item count. Like it’s reconciling in the background. At times there’s the little progress window showing it’s uploading GB’s of data.. I’ve read that if you modify a file it’ll force it to update in iCloud and then you should be fine. I’ve ended up cleaning things up and zipping some folders. Everything’s been fine for me now for a few days. But it sounds like others are having odd iCloud related issues, too. Hopefully gets addressed sooner than later.
Is this on Big Sur?
 
Maybe there’s some bugginess to be worked out, still. Seems ok at the moment.
 
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