Driving me mad

Am I missing something with Apple’s new iCloud Drive? I use an iMac and a MacBook Air. When I transferred large files on my iMac to iCloud Drive it took up disk space on my MacBook Air. Subsequently I transferred everything back to Dropbox. Am I doing something wrong? Phil Ashwell Paul Blachford says: iCloud Drive continues to be a source of problems and confusion for many; it hasn’t been handled well by Apple. Your problem is one that many of us are facing. The way iCloud works is that it will replicate locally on another machine anything in iCloud Drive that you’ve stored from another machine. People assume iCloud is a good way to free up disk space on a Mac, but having ‘moved’ a large amount of data to iCloud Drive, they find that no space has really been saved. Unfortunately, you’re likely to have a small drive with a MacBook Air, so we understand your frustration! Dropbox can selectively choose files and folders to sync across different computers (unlike iCloud Drive that syncs everything held in iCloud). If you want to keep your MacBook Air free from extra files, yet still get access to the data you were trying to sync in iCloud, then Dropbox is the better option. to see anything prior to the rebuild. I saw all the dates but without any files. The reason I moved away from Windows was because I didn’t want to waste days trying to fix things – I want things to ‘just work’ again! Spencer Grogan Tom Harrod says: We share your pain, Spencer, with the poor impression of Apple’s QA procedures during the early days of iOS 8 and OS X Yosemite. That you could upgrade an iOS device to iOS 8 and render your Mac unable to automatically sync your docs with iCloud was especially annoying; we’d rather Apple rolled out iCloud Drive as part of iOS 8.1 to avoid this. With all of the negative attention that these releases garnered – even among the mainstream press – we expect Apple will more carefully manage the release of its next operating systems.

You aren’t the first person we’ve heard of having trouble with previous Time Machine backups being unreadable, but this isn’t something we’ve experienced for ourselves. This discussion on Apple’s site (discussions. apple.com/thread/6601861) sounds like the same problem you’re having – the response marked as the solution is to browse to the Applications folder before opening Time Machine’s interface, and then to browse to your Home folder from within the star-field interface. The pre-Yosemite backups of your files should then be visible to you.