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by sssilver 16 days ago
What's the issue with iCloud?
2 comments

It doesn't have a great cross platform support (no Linux client, and there are many complaints for the Windows client).

Personally, I dislike that you cannot restore an older version of a file on laptop/phone, and must instead use their web app, for which you need to disable ADP, which defeats its purpose.

While there isn't a proper Linux client, if you find yourself on a Linux box and need to sync to or from iCloud, rclone[1] works great. Just putting this out there in the hope that it might help someone.

It's also (ironically given TFA) what I used to sync all my files off dropbox when I cancelled my subscription because of their misuse of root to re-add their thing to special permissions on macOs after I had removed it.[2]

[1] https://rclone.org/

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12463338 not trying to reopen a flame war, but for me personally, that was one of those things a company doesn't get to do to me twice. As soon as it happened, I copied my files off and cancelled. In fact I'm there somewhere in the comments on that article saying I was going to be cancelling and I immediately did.

That's neat! I had no idea rclone supported iCloud now. Looks like they added support about a year ago[1].

Step-by-step instructions: https://rclone.org/iclouddrive/

I just tested, and it worked... rclone is such an amazing and incredible project.

[1] https://rclone.org/changelog/#v1-69-0-2025-01-12

I know it’s not a official client but rclone have great iCloud support (but only if you don’t enable advanced data protection).
Mounting Dropbox on Linux machines is really easy. Google Drive has terrible support for binary files and namespaces.

For business purposes I didn't want to use iCloud. But it seems like it's iCloud & Dropbox then.