I am facing a confusing issue with iCloud sync. I want to replicate my iPhone setup of a corpus of curated documents, papers and notes which amounts to 9.78 GB on iPhone storage. My current iCloud plan is 50GB. My iPod 7th Gen space is 128 GB. I have synced the MN3 corpus to iCloud. On my iPod I installed MN3 and started the sync process. The space eats up really fast on iPod even when MN3 app storage (via Settings->General->iPod storage shows that MN3 is now 10 GBs. So what exactly is happening because even though MN3 local storage seems to be congruent to the iPhone MN3 local storage, the TOTAL space on iPod shoots up to 30GB space taken up for some reason. So is iCloud storing its cloud files once again on the iPod locally? Where is this extra space getting downloaded? I have already spent 40GB online data just experimenting with upload and download options. If I totally delete the iCloud folder then the space reduced to local MN3 app only and some space is restored. How to manage all this? If I need two devices to be in sync what is the best way to do it if iCloud is so weird.? Should I just use Airport and copy the folders to a local MN3 directory?
The recent Crowdstrike debacle reminded me of my own experience with MN3 crashing my iPhone and not being able to boot as it totally hanged while the screen was somehow still responsive to touch but nothing was working, not even hard reboot. Be very cautious before you engage in MN3 backup routine. You could be busy doing something else and phone itself will go offline until battery finishes and you can reboot on recharge.
Issue #1: If you take a bulk backup and space on iPhone is less than total backup MN3 will not check at outset total available space and hang your phone. This is a logical error and before copy a simple check with modal dialog box warning to user can alleviate all such issues.
Solution : Battery finishes and then reboot on recharge clears out temp buffer and phone works again.
Suggestion : MN3 can have its own file manager with clear indication for sizes and file paths with permissions and labels.
Issue #2: I am using FTP via GoFTP on iOS and midnight commander on RPi to transfer books to each iDevice. Between iDevices I am using Airdrop to share backups. External USB devices via USB adapter and NAS in my home network gives me access to every file I need on the spot.
iCloud sync is done at the moment around 10GB. I am also using iPod but Sync is turned off because it takes 3 times the space and I don’t understand where is all that extra space going to.
I need to understand how the iCloud drive might be a duplicate copy of what is online and thus we have 2 backup zones one local and one online with a local second copy and that is why MN3 is using double the space. In that case how do you propose using iCloud sync? Keep double space redundancy and waste it or repurpose and remove iCloud drive local cache? It’s is very confusing…