For the past few months, I gave iCloud Drive a shot at being my | |
"files in the cloud" service. Today, I've stopped using it. Again. | |
I say "again" because this is the second time I've tried using | |
iCloud Drive. The first time ended terribly, with lost files and | |
months of working with Apple Support. I gave it some time to let | |
them iron out the kinks (iCloud Drive was still pretty new at that | |
time) and decided to try it again. | |
The good news is I didn't lose any files this time. However, after | |
months of using it, there are just too many little annoyances for | |
me to continue using it. Here are the things I found wrong with or | |
annoying about iCloud Drive, ordered from least annoying to most. | |
iPhone asks for my password, or at least a separate pin, to get to | |
the files. iCloud Drive is wide open for anyone who can unlock my | |
phone. I thought I would like the ease of use of not having to put | |
in a password to get to my files, but honestly I miss the extra | |
bit of security. | |
mobile app. | |
pretty much all the other cloud drive services have a way to share | |
a file to anyone via a link. iCloud Drive does not. | |
no convenient way of getting to the files outside of that sidebar | |
icon, unless you make your own way. The iCloud Drive sidebar entry | |
takes you to to a folder in your user's Library directory (hidden | |
in Finder by default). Unless you memorize the directory hierarchy | |
to get to it, or give yourself a shortcut/alias/link, you'll have | |
a difficult time getting to your iCloud Drive files from Terminal.app | |
and others. It's definitely inconvenient. | |
get duplicate files. This usually happens with my password manager's | |
auto-backup feature. If I have a password database called passwords.db | |
then open that in my password manager, it will create a file called | |
passwords.db~ that is a temporary backup of anything you've done | |
that isn't saved yet. That way, if the program crashes, you shouldn't | |
lose any work. The issue is, iCloud drive was causing multiple | |
backup files to be made: passwords.db~, passwords.db~2, passwords.db~3, | |
etc. Very annoying. Even it flat out duplicated my password database | |
a couple of times. My best guess it that it just doesn't handle | |
lots of saving to the same file very well. I don't know what else | |
it could be. Also, before you think it's just an issue with my | |
password manager, since that's both of the examples I gave earlier, | |
let me say that it has also occurred with my financial software | |
and other programs as well. | |
There might be other issues that I've forgotten or haven't noticed | |
yet, especially with the iCloud Drive iOS app. However, this is a | |
good overview of the things I found most consistently hindering. | |
Perhaps I'll give iCloud Drive a third chance in the future. For | |
now, though, I'll stick with ownCloud. |