How to solve the annoying iCloud Drive stuck issue

I have been using iCloud service for years because I am an apple product user, I own iPad, iPhone, MacBook Pro and Apple Watch. iCloud is an essential service to use in order to sync data across these devices.

I would say iCloud is an okay service, most of the time it syncs data without issues, although sometimes it may have some delay.

While iCloud is an acceptable service, iCloud Drive is most troublesome one. If you use MacOS, you will occasionally find that iCloud Drive stuck when syncing.

You can find out the sync progress of iCloud Drive through the Finder app, it just stuck at uploading and seems like never finish syncing.

It could just be I am not patient enough, but I have seen it stuck more than 10 minutes. Sometimes I want it to sync immediately because I have to switch to another device, or I am leaving home or my workplace.

There is a command that you can execute to restart the iCloud Drive service:

killall bird

That’s it, after killing the service, it will automatically restart itself, and files will start syncing immediately.

I haven’t notice any side effects by using this command, but of course it is better to wait patiently if you have time, and only use this command as a last resort.

As I can tell this issues has been around for years and Apple still haven’t fixed it. Let’s hope it will be fixed next year.