Despite having a 2TB iCloud account, I also have an identically sized Dropbox one, and the latter is my primary cloud service for working files.
The reason for favoring Dropbox over iCloud is the speed of synchronization. Dropbox almost always syncs near instantaneously while iCloud is much less reliable …
For example, I was working on a Scrivener document on the desktop of my MacBook Air last night, and by 10am this morning it still hadn’t synced with iCloud.
That’s far from a one-off experience: iCloud can take anywhere from minutes to hours – and occasionally even days – before files eventually synchronize between devices. It seems utterly ridiculous to me that I’ve been voicing this same complaint for more than a decade now.
Dropbox very occasionally suffers from the same thing, but thanks to a feature in the Mac app, it is very easy to resolve. All you need to do is right-click on the file or folder concerned and then select Sync Next or Sync Now depending on which version of the app you are using.
I mostly only ever use this if I’m automatically uploading a large number of meaty files, most commonly video clips from my Blackmagic camera system, and want one of these to be uploaded ahead of the rest. But on the very rare occasions that an errant file fails to promptly sync, this will always fix it.
There is, however, no equivalent feature for iCloud on the Mac. Googling for this shows me that I’m far from alone in finding this frustrating. The only solutions suggested are very clunky ones like signing out of iCloud and then signing back in, force-quitting apps, restarting the Mac, and so on.
Clearly the ideal would be if Apple could make iCloud as responsive as Dropbox. But if the company can’t do this, I would settle for a sync now feature to at least address the frustrating experience of updating a file on one Mac and needing to access it on another one shortly afterwards.
Is this an frustration you’ve also experienced? Would you benefit from being able to choose which file syncs next when doing things like copying multiple video files from a camera to your Mac? Please take our poll, and share your thoughts and experiences in the comments.
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