Support for iCloud

iCloud is an area we need to revisit. We did some initial experimentation a while ago, but the interfaces we needed were not available. I know some of that has been fleshed out on Apple’s side, although I am not sure to what extent.

Suffice to say it is something we would like to offer in the future, but there are no concrete plans at this time.

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Does the drive service not include iCloud? That is what I use mostly and would only use this service if it included iCloud.

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Apple is still missing the public APIs we need to properly integrate to iCloud Drive into odrive. Hopefully this will change in the future.

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still not working?? would be good to have

Any closer to adding iCloud yet?

Hi @olivia,
No updates at this time. We will be sure to announce when we do.
Take a look at this post to make sure you are updated on all important announcements and releases:

Hi @Tony,

So I too am wondering what is going on with iCloud drive sync support with odrive and I am a little perplexed when you say that Apple does not offer a “public API” to iCloud. (I presume you mean both or either iCloud app storage as well as iCloud Drive.) Being that iCloud has vast support from applications which use it for synchronizing settings, data files, and so forth by use of CloudKit. Also, Apple provides a full SDK fir iCloud Drive as well with XCode 8. Therefore, I am wondering what functionality odrive needs to make iCloud support of either happen? Granted, iCloud is undoubtedly complex and frankly end users stand a good chance of accidentally breaking things by trying to manually muck about with CloudKit data files, so I suspect odrive would be wise to provide some level of obfuscation to try to help prevent that from happening. But even so it doesn’t make a lot of sense when you say that the support simply does not exist when it clearly does. Perhaps it is more complex than what other cloud providers offer. (For instance, if you support B2, I should think you can support anything considering how it handles large files- then again I haven’t tested your large file support on B2 so I have no idea if odrive actually supports this.) Anyway, if there are other reasons hampering iCloud support that are “more technical”, you are dealing with some technical people here, so you don’t have to shy away from “telling it like it is.” For Mac Users, iCloud support is core, and to provide some other omnibus access to this Apple “black box” would be a huge offer.

All things told, even if you were to ask for more money for “expanded features” like iCloud support, I think people would pay it. What odrive is attempting is a really tall order, and I feel like you guys simply are trying to take on the world and considering your price point I can see how you don’t have the resources to take on such a daunting undertaking. What I am suggesting is that it is not that Apple doesn’t offer the API, it’s that it’s a very big task and Apple is notorious for changing how they do things every other OS release. I’d be reticent to support it too.

Anyway, I hope to hear from you about this.

Best,
Matt

Hi @DarfNader,
Apple doesn’t provide a general, open API for iCloud. The CloudKit and the SDK can be used to access siloed/sandboxed data for your specific application, but not for general drive data access and management, which is what we would need.

Essentially, you can only access data that your application has put in.

We spent some time trying to reverse engineer private methods for general iCloud access, but it wasn’t viable for production use.

Any plans on iCloud integration?

Hi @keith.buckner,
Take a look at the above post.

Not sure what you think of this idea but I got a suggestion for you.

Personally, I use Macs for just about everything thanks to docker and parallels. That being said I use a Mac mini (cheap as hell) to store media, books, backup data, etc. Its my little storage server.

Now I like dropbox, one drive, amazon cloud drive, google drive, and iCloud for all different reasons. The continual issue though is that when you really want the latest and greatest it means committing to a platform your services may not be ready for yet.

The point: How about an option to make one computer the personal file server for chosen folders (such as iCloud files and folders synced to that computer), sync the data through odrive, allowing us to access our files from one personal file server no matter where we are. :slight_smile:

That solution right there would solve a ton of headaches for me personally.d

Hi @claywdittman,
You could do something like this with FTP/WebDAV/SFTP linking available with odrive. You can expose the file server via one of those protocols and sync to it using odrive.

SFTP (SSH) on a Mac should pretty much work out of the box. I have a post on setting up WebDAV on Windows here: How do I setup a WebDAV Server on Windows and link it to odrive?

right? that solution works perfectly for 40% of geeks. But if you 1) aren’t allowed access to that storage servers public router or 2) have no clue what a port is because your a slight techy noob then you are kind of screwed. Relaying the files through Odrive would allow you to offer a on premise iCloud Drive connection and/or personal cloud for those paranoid people who want to keep some data to themselves OoO… .

In case you are wondering, I’m in case 1, for the next two months at least. But I know lots of people who would probably struggle for hours trying to figure out how to open that port on their router and activate the service on their Mac.

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So, I don’t know why everyone else hasn’t thought of this but I literally just put my odrive file location inside my iCloud storage…

Why do people want iCloud to work with odrive if they can just put their odrive into iCloud?

iCloud is a 100% personal cloud. Is the intent to people able to share files from iCloud with other individuals?

Hi @z3thon,
Thanks for the input.

I usually recommend not doing this just because I have seen some conflicting behavior when two sync engines work on the same data at the same time. It may work just fine, though, depending on your use case and general usage patterns.

+1 for adding iCloud storage to Odrive. That would be super awesome especially for Windows users. Lucky me, I have both a Windows and Mac laptop.

Hi There!

I see these iCloud questions are from 2016. I’m wondering if you are continuing to consider iCloud as one of your cloud partners? Or, no…

Thanks! Alison

Hi @alisonbarnesmartin,
Unfortunately Apple doesn’t provide a proper interface for us to utilize, yet. See this post for more details:

+1 for iCloud support! :+1:

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So just checking boys and girls… End of 2021 Now! Desperately want iCloud Support!!! I bounce back and forth between ios and android, osx and windows. I can access ALL of my files on any of my devices through ODrive EXCEPT for my iCloud stuff which drives me batty bonkers insane :slight_smile: Find it hard to believe there’s not an acceptable solution by now?

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