OS X doesn't seem to initiate sync

[Colleen Easley]

My iDevises are working well and seem to know when there is something to sync, but my MacBook Air just sits there. Sometimes if I’ve had the program closed and open it up, it will initiate a sync, but sometimes not. I find it frustrating to know know if my stuff has synced or not. What’s the best way to force the MacBook Air to sync?

[Brendan]

Hi Colleen,

The Mac will auto-sync only when there’s data in iCloud that has been downloaded to your Mac. That data will come from your other devices only sometime after you’ve pressed the upload to iCloud button on those other devices.

Uploading data to iCloud is a manual process.

Downloading data from iCloud is automatic and cannot be forced.

If you watch the video in the online user manual, it will give you a good idea how it works. Manual upload, automatic download.

Thanks,

Brendan

[Brendan]

Oh, and it’s best to just upload from one device at a time, waiting for all your other devices to auto-sync.

[Colleen Easley]

I am only updating from my iMac and update iCloud from there. Both iPad and iPhone are doing an automatic sync, but the MacBook Air just doesn’t seem to want to sync automatically. But if I click the sync button on the Air, it will then so the sync.

[Brendan]

Hi Colleen,

Oh I see. That’s odd. When you click the upload button, Tap Forms does do one final check to see if there’s any files waiting for it to sync, but in general it just uploads the data. Sync should happen automatically. Are you giving it enough time to auto-sync?

If you want to monitor iCloud Drive to see exactly what’s happening, you can type the following command into the Terminal application:

brctl log -w

That will tell you when your MacBook Air is receiving files from iCloud. It might give you an idea if things are working as expected or not.

Thanks!

Brendan

[Colleen Easley]

Yes, I’m sure I was giving it plenty of time.

Tonight I decided to try it again. Reset the sync, and then everything was working except the iPad. When I tried to turn off Sync and select ‘Keep on iCloud Only’ it kept crashing. I rebooted the iPad, and tried turning off sync again, quit the program, opened it again and now it’s finally synced again. But it’s so frustrating to feel like I just can’t trust it to work every time.

Just did one more change on the iMac and every device synced almost immediately.. I’m going to bed happy for now anyway. Whoops – made a change on the iPad uploaded and both computers synced, but the phone hasn’t yet. Tried again and this time it worked within a minute – go figure! Now I’ll go to bed!

Also, I’m noticing that some of my devise icons are gone. When I first turned on sync they were all there, but now a couple syncs later, the two computer icons are missing. Not a big deal, but a minor glitch, maybe.

Thanks for your help.

[Josef Tingbratt]

I have the same problem with sync on my iphone. Seems as the iPad sync works better.

[Author]

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