iCloud for Mac is stuck on "waiting to upload"

I had a folder with a cloud in my Mac Finder that would not go away. None of the contents of the folder had a cloud. So, everything was sync'd to icloud which I could verify by viewing the files on my iphone. The solution was to create a new empty folder, move the contents from the original folder into the new one. Delete the old one and rename the new one to the same name. Fixed!

I fixed this by duplicating the problem file, waiting for new file to completely upload, then deleting the original. Seemed to do the trick!

I had the same problem earlier today, on my iPad. It’s an old issue, isn’t it. I solved it by the following -

1. Settings
2. Tap my name (Apple ID, iCloud, etc.) at top left

3 Tap iCloud in list on right 4 Scroll down to iCloud Drive 5 Tap the green ‘toggle’ button, far right, to switch off iCloud’s use of iCloud Drive

At that point, a message opened saying that if I continued, data waiting to be uploaded to iCloud Drive could be lost if I continued to ‘disconnect’ iCloud Drive. There was an option to continue or cancel. 6. Hit CANCEL

I then went back to the app space on iCloud where I had tried to create a folder and upload a file, but which were ‘waiting’ and hung up. Immediately, the upload completed and was available across all my devices. Good Luck! Hold on to your sanity!

Hey Everyone - After reading this thread, I noticed the solution is not here. I found it already on another thread and it works like A MIRACLE. Hope this is helpful. And thanks to its author.

"do not forget that osx is based on unix. what helped me is changing of 'bird' process priority ('bird' process is responsible for icloud replication).

Double click on ☁️ iCloud icon in finder to see progress.

Go to Terminal

ps aux | grep bird

You will see your bird process id, in my case it is 815.

serg 815 98.8 0.8 4542828 137776 ?? U Thu09PM 2047:53.94 /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/CloudDocsDaemon.framework/Versions/A/Support/bird

Check current priority of bird process

ps -fl -C 815

(Replace 815 on your bird process id from step 3). If you never changed it before, it will be 0 (under NI column, but formatting of output is not nice).

Change priority (negative numbers are high priority, based on research -20 is the highest, but do not put it, I suggest to put -10) to do it.

sudo renice -n -10 -p 815

(again replace 815 on your bird process id from step 3). It will ask for password if you are not root currently in terminal.

If it worked, you should see progress in the iCloud progress dialog you opened on step 1. I cannot guarantee it will work always, as iCloud is blackbox. Unfortunately i.e. mac has a unix core, but all above it is blackbox proprietary software"

I was definitely having this problem too. I tried several suggestions made here, but I'm unwilling to log out of iCloud and have it delete everything in iCloud and start again. That would take a huge amount of time and I'm not sure it would completely solve the problem. (Would I have to do that again and again?) In my case, I discovered that the problem probably wasn't that the process wasn't happening, but rather that it was just incredibly slow. The new files that I was adding which didn't seem to be uploading were video files, typically 3 to 5 MB. One thing I tried to kickstart the process was to log into iCloud in Safari, navigate to the folder where uploads should be landing, then navigate to the corresponding folder in the Finder and drag a file from Finder to the Safari window. That certainly seemed to start the upload process, but now I'm not sure that it wasn't already going.

The next thing I did was to go to a Finder window and scroll down the sidebar to iCloud Drive. (I should have done this first.) I could see the (almost empty) progress wheel indicating that uploading was happening. By clicking the info button, I could see that 4 files were being uploaded and that a tiny fraction of the 12 MB had already made it to iCloud. The fact that the number didn't change quickly made me wonder if it was stalled, but by being patient I could see that it was slowly moving. It took more than an hour, but eventually all the files went up. Unfortunately I can't know if my "kickstart" helped or if it was already happening and I just didn't notice.

Of course, that upload speed is not acceptable!

So the next thing I tried was the terminal commands suggested by b1connected. Changing the priority of the upload process seemed like a hopeful avenue. I'm not a frequent Terminal user, so when I had trouble entering my password (there's no blinking cursor and no indication that it's even taking your input until you hit enter) I stopped and decided maybe I should log in as root. I realized that I had never enabled the root user on this machine, so I went into system preferences and did that. (Apple gives clear instructions on how to do this. You can look it up.) Then I logged out of my Mac (NOT out of iCloud), and logged back in as the root user. Now I could use Terminal and it would take my commands without a password. But after running Terminal, I realize that my desktop wasn't there and I didn't even know how to find my notes on how to do the Terminal process recommended by b1connected.

Ok, not worth it. I logged out of root and logged back in as myself.

Just on a whim, I went to one of my desktop folders and duplicated a 2 megabyte file. In seconds, it uploaded to iCloud!!!

It makes no sense to me that simply logging out, logging in as root, logging out, and logging in as me should work, but it seems like it did. I have no idea if this will last. Maybe the problem will come back tomorrow.

I did go ahead and do the Terminal procedure recommended by b1connected. Why not?

I also faced this problem and I think it's time to move to dropbox because that problem is open during one year and still not solved.

I've been stuck on this issue for about 2 days, actively trying to solve it. SOLVED NOW! My iCloud Drive folders/files did not appear on my MacBook and newly created files were not uploaded to derive no matter what I did. I tried logging out/in, killing bird process, increasing priority of the process, digging down to the logs and so on... In the end, solution was pretty easy.

BEFORE: I had 2 user accounts on my MacBook, work and private account. Work user account had work Apple ID as primary iCloud account and personal Apple ID as secondary iCloud account to only fetch events from private calendar. Private user account had personal Apple ID as a primary account.

NOW: As soon as I removed personal Apple ID from work user account (used to be secondary account without possibility to sync files), syncing started to work on my private user account (personal Apple ID as primary iCloud account)!

@apple - how about mentioning this somewhere in troubleshooting guides? Same Apple ID accounts cannot be used in 2 different user accounts on different level (primary vs. secondary) simultaneously?

This is really disruptive not to mention frustrating. Come'On Apple!

I just restarted my mac and it works again.

Same here---permanent "Waiting to upload".

Still failing even after iCloud logout/login.

Apply still hasn't responded to this thread even after 3 years.

Not much of a cloud. Pretty embarrassing.

Thank goodness for OneDrive and Google Drive.

I found this tip: https://sleonproductions.com/how-to-fix-icloud-drive-stuck-at-uploading-in-mac/

after that I gave the command killall bid in the terminal and it seems fixed. hope it stays that way..

I'm having the same issue. Been happening repeatedly for the past 2-3 years now. Signing in and out of iCloud has worked previously, but it's not a viable long term solution as it requires uploading many GB of files, and takes many hours each time. I have gone as long as 6 months with no issues before, but I've had this issue twice in the 2 weeks.

The most recently time, I tried Jurjan's advice above (deleting the CloudDocs folder, and then killing the iCloud Service Helper), which seems to have worked (it still took a while as it re-synced GBs of data, but not as long as a full afternoon of re-downloading).

With Apple's cloud services (and iCloud in particular), being a key pillar of their business and product strategy, this really needs to be resolved. People like myself may be considering alternative Cloud Drive options. When iCloud works, it's great, and seamless, but having iCloud fall over in the background without notification or clear resolution is not sustainable. It's also not ideal that there have been no official acknowledgement or feedback of the issue from Apple (unless I've missed it)?

Hoping this gets picked up and resolved soon.

I confirm this issue is cross-platform (macOS, Windows) and it's interesting it hasn't been resolved yet

Empty your trash is the solution to fix waiting to upload bug on iCloud 🔑

I was exporting Pages files to PDFs and not changing the name....everything before the extension stayed the same. I renamed the pdf (added pdf to the name and it immediately synced.

In some cases, I can open a file in a folder that is not syncing and it will upload. Watch the progress indicator in the sidebar.