brctl

or… how to work with iCloud drive hiccups. to just go ahead, run

brctl

and check the available commands

monitor iCloud drive sync status

com.apple.CloudDocs refers to iCloud Drive

brctl monitor com.apple.CloudDocs

the thing is, I have no idea how to fix the issues reported in there. it’ll tell you which things are not able to sync across icloud and there’s just no way to fix things. go back to dropbox if you want something reliable.

download all iCloud drive files

2021, you still can’t trust iCloud to have all files downloaded manually. If you really want to make sure that all files are locally, switch to another syncing tool like Dropbox.

otherwise, this might work:

cd ~/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/ && find . -type f -print0 | xargs -0 brctl download

restart iCloud process

killall bird

debug iCloud with Cirrus

• Cirrus is a free utility to help with iCloud issues. iCloud Drive, CloudDocs, all iCloud related things. It also let’s you download and evict files from iCloud instead of using the command line like described above.