The Finder sidebar on my Mac Studio has long shown a laggy to throttled iCloud sync icon, suggesting that something was not syncing correctly. I do use iCloud to sync documents (and photos) between my devices, but I don’t notice any such behavior on any other devices, and in terms of being able to find what I’m looking for, I always can. So new files sync fine, and changes to documents sync fine, too. I even leave some OmniOutliner documents open on multiple computers and I’ve never run into an issue.

I checked with ChatGPT about this after seeing if possibly it was network related (it’s not, as far as I can tell). I eventually asked it for some terminal commands to help me diagnose the problem, and it suggested tryin the bctrl command. Which I did.

After trying ChatGPT’s first suggestion, I read the usage output and went with just brctl status. This revealed a list of files:

I went into the Finder and found each offending file and deleted them (they would then materialize in the same directory). It must have been one particular file that was causing the issue, because after deleting it, the output from brctl was clean. Well, almost.

There were “unclean items” being reported as well, and the progress wheel in the Finder was still stuck. The brctl output was less verbose about the location of these files, but it did share truncated file name information. I used Finder Search to figure out which files were the culprit. So I ditched those files and whoosh no more stuck progress wheel.