iCloud ruined my day
Yesterday, I was doing my usual tinkering on the computer, when things
went haywire. Suddenly, apps wouldn't launch. Or would take up to a
minute to launch. The Finder was crashing constantly. Trying to "Save
As..." anything caused apps to hang.
I played back the things
I may have installed or changed, but nothing jumped out as a feasible
cause.
After an hour of trying simple things and rebooting,
I re-installed Sonoma. No change. Starting in Safe Mode seemed
to work, but then didn't. I disconnected every drive and USB device.
Nothing helped.
Somehow it felt network related. It was just
a feeling, but that's all I had by that point. I noticed that the apps
that wouldn't launch were mostly apps that relied on iCloud for sync. A
few searches pointed to turning off iCloud. One in particular mentioned
deleting ~/Library/Application Support/CloudFiles. So I did that.
Stopped iCloud (and didn't bother keeping copies of the files, since
they were already in iCloud and backed up elsewhere). Then I deleted the
CloudFiles folder. Then started iCloud.
Once all my iCloud
stuff was re-synced, the machine started working great. Apps launch
instantly. The Finder works. "Save As..." works. I can finally get back
to my tinkering.
I'm not going to stay mad enough at iCloud
to swear it off and move to Linux or anything, but that kind of sucked.