

A Cautionary Tale: Do not move or rename your iCloud folder - danieldk
http://www.tuaw.com/2012/08/22/a-cautionary-tale-do-not-move-or-rename-your-icloud-folder/

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btown
"As if it were a swarm of bees, you should stay away from the SyncServices
folder." - <http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1865>

Wow. When Apple's copywriting is that down-to-earth, you know that something
is different.

In seriousness, between this fragility and the lack of nested folders in
iCloud, I get the feeling that Apple's taken a leaf out of Windows 8's book on
this one... by focusing on non-power users, they'll generate a lot of hate and
bad press from their once-loyal power-user customers.

~~~
Udo
I'm a non-iCloud user (well, sort of), and I can't fathom a scenario where I
would ever be tempted to use it. _However_ , it's completely understandable
what happened here and the guy even states this repeatedly: it was entirely
his fault. He corrupted his own data.

That said, the magnitude of problems resulting from this surprised me. What
happens if an iCloud sync folders gets corrupted due to a technical problem
one day? Isn't this fragility also kind of a nightmare for Apple's developers?

~~~
gwillen
Yeah, I don't think he can reasonably declare this to be his own fault. He's
doing that to avoid criticism, but realistically, there's no conceivable
reason that moving the local endpoint of the sync on one machine should cause
the other machines to try to move their local endpoint. I can't even fathom
how you could code it to make this kind of disaster happen.

~~~
wvs
Most file references in Apple's frameworks track by both the target's path and
inode, with the inode considered "more canonical". This is used in NSDocument
apps where when you move a file with it still open, the app can tell where it
went and continue working at the new path. Finder aliases (different from
symlinks) also do this.

------
DHowett
Nowhere did he mention disabling iCloud, moving the directory back into place,
and re-enabling it.

That might seem like the first step in solving this problem, and I wouldn't
doubt that he did it if not for the instant jump to "restoring my iPad didn't
help. everything is miserably broken so I called Apple."

~~~
chucknelson
I was thinking the same thing - was there an attempt to restore things to the
way they were? Using time machine to revert that one folder would have been
interesting to try, considering it was hosed anyway.

------
pronoiac
I think if he'd made a symbolic link within his Dropbox folder to his iCloud
folder, it would have worked as expected. At least, that's how the Linux
client works.

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RexRollman
I wonder what kind of link he used? Can directories have hard links on HFS+?

~~~
__david__
Yes. That is, in fact, how Time Machine backs up so quickly. But I believe
there are no userspace utilities to create them (and major POSIX assumptions
break down, so you need to be careful if you do it in your everyday data).

~~~
novas0x2a
Much to my surprise, rsync on osx (with the --link-dest arg, iirc) can create
directory hardlinks. I was unable to figure out any other tool to delete them;
I ended up having to rsync an empty directory on top.

------
at-fates-hands
Wow - talk about dodging a bullet. I just had a co-worker tell me to try
something similar since I'm an avid Dropbox user. Although I don't use icloud,
this story probably saved me quite a bit of frustration.

------
aklofas
Ubuntu One ftw :)

~~~
jcoder
For those of us not on Ubuntu, care to explain why?

~~~
batista
Obviously because in Ubuntu you can freely move the non-existing iCloud
folder.

