It has been [0] days since the last iCloud de-synchronization incident

The Mojave upgrade completely hosed iCloud Drive uploads on both my home and work computers, and it took me like a week to notice it and my text files drifted way out of sync.

I was able to fix it:

• Manually find any files with the dotted cloud icon (indicating that they're perma-stuck on uploading) and move them somewhere safe.
• Disable iCloud Drive in settings, tell it to delete everything, and tell it to cancel uploads and delete NOW instead of finishing (since the whole problem is that those uploads will never complete).
• Re-enable iCloud Drive and wait for it to download most things.
• Once it stops downloading, find the folders where it decided it didn't want to download quite everything, and force downloads of the remaining files. (Usually you can just right-click and say download now, but it seems to have an issue with empty files, so you might have to open those in an editor.)
• Compare the files you rescued earlier to the current contents of your folders, and move them back into place as needed.

But good grief, what a gross mess. Doing that kind of nuclear re-sync and manual clean-up is so fucking nasty!

I've had one or two de-synchronization problems in my years of using Dropbox, too, and it's never a great scene. (The big one I can remember had to do with a bad software update that blocked further updates, so I had to manually re-install.) But even with the worst of those, I don't think I ever had to nuke and re-download; it's generally been able to hit the ground running. And Dropbox has a kind of huge advantage on the ratio — I only moved these folders into Drive a couple weeks ago, and we're already at one monumental cock-up and counting.

I'm gonna keep using iCloud Drive for now, because I needed it for those recent improvements I made to my note-taking tools. (Dropbox disabled a feature I was relying on in iA Writer, and hasn't updated their support for the Files app to replace that functionality, so iCloud is currently the best way to give Writer persistent access to an arbitrary folder of synced files.) But damn, it's a bummer that Apple's services are still so rinky-dink and fragile. And it's exacerbated by the fact that they STILL don't give you any worthwhile level of administrative interface to help debug these things! The whole concept of "no interface, it just works" is predicated on the software never ever doing this shit.

Anyway, this is why it took me like four or five years to actually put anything of value in iCloud Drive, is because I sometimes have the power to see the future and I literally had a vision of this in like 2014.