Despite having a 2TB iCloud account, I also have an equally large Dropbox, and that is my primary cloud service for work files.
The reason why Dropbox is favored over iCloud is the speed of synchronization. Dropbox almost always syncs almost instantly, 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 it still hadn’t synced to iCloud at 10am this morning.
This is far from a one-time experience: iCloud can take minutes to hours—and sometimes days—for files to finally sync between devices. I find it absolutely ridiculous that I have been making the same complaint for over a decade.
Dropbox very occasionally suffers from the same thing, but the feature in the Mac app makes it very easy to fix. All you have to do is right-click on the file or folder in question and then select Sync Next or Sync Now depending on the version of the app you’re using.
I usually only use this when I’m automatically uploading a large number of mass files, mostly video clips from my Blackmagic camera system, and I want one of them to upload before the others. But in the very rare cases where a faulty file fails to sync immediately, it always fixes it.
However, there is no equivalent feature for iCloud on Mac. A Google search shows me that I’m far from alone in finding this frustrating. The only solutions suggested are very clunky, like signing out of iCloud and then signing in, force-quitting apps, restarting your Mac, and so on.
It would be ideal if Apple could make iCloud as responsive as Dropbox. But if the company can’t do that, I’d settle for a sync feature now to at least solve the frustrating experience of updating a file on one Mac and having to access it on another shortly afterward.
Is this a frustration you’ve experienced as well? Would you benefit from being able to choose which file syncs next when you’re doing things like copying multiple video files from your camera to your Mac? Please fill out our survey and share your opinions and experiences in the comments.
Photo by Aron Visuals on Unsplash
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