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Our resident genius Howard Oakley solves your Mac and iOS problems
The mother of all iCloud syncs
THANKS TO A bug in iCloud Drive, dating back to its debut in Yosemite, the Optimize Mac Storage option had a mind of its own. As a result, many of us were able to turn the option off, but still remove local copies of files that remained stored in iCloud.
Although it’s good to see that fixed in Sonoma, without warning, its effects can be unwanted and alarming. If you upgrade with storage optimization turned off, all those files you had evicted to cloud storage can return to haunt you in an epic sync that can take days to complete.
If ever we needed to be warned of a change in behavior resulting from fixing a bug, it was surely with Sonoma. If you haven’t upgraded yet, beware, if you’ve turned Optimize Mac Storage off, you could be in for the mother of all iCloud syncs when you do.