Normally, unless you enable Optimise Mac Storage in the iCloud section of the Apple ID pane, the contents of your iCloud Drive are kept in a downloaded state, ensuring that you can use them immediately. Those can be told apart in the Finder and elsewhere using standard icons: that showing a cloud with a downward arrow means that item has been evicted, and the file shown in the Finder is but a stub. The first of those has been downloaded, and the second has been evicted from local storage. On your Mac, files in iCloud Drive exist in one of two states: a local and complete copy, which is kept in sync with that held in iCloud, or a stub file which relies entirely on downloading the file contents from iCloud when you want to access it. So when you put a file into iCloud Drive, what your Mac does is negotiate that with the database server, which then stores the file as a record containing its data and metadata. ICloud is a vast distributed database, in which each user’s data and files are just a few of its contents. This article aims to provide a little understanding, and maybe even help you to a solution. Thankfully the changes to iCloud in Monterey are relatively minor, but have still caused plenty of users to complain of syncs that seem never to end, and other issues. Just a few years ago, changes which had already been announced had to be cancelled early in beta-testing because of the devastation they caused to existing iCloud accounts. ICloud is one of those features in macOS which works almost all the time for the great majority of users, but is vulnerable to problems when Apple makes changes to it, typically in a major new version of macOS.

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