I’ve been having problems trying to use iCloud Drive on my Mac. If I try to copy or move a file into iCloud Drive using Finder, I get an error -36. If I try to open a PDF that is already in iCloud Drive using Preview, I get an error message saying “Couldn’t communicate with a helper application.” Numbers files give the same message. On the other hand, I can view the contents of text or PDF files in iCloud Drive using Quick Look, and I can copy a file into it using the ditto command in Terminal, and the file does get uploaded to the cloud.
After looking at some previous similar discussions, I tried turning off iCloud Drive syncing and turning it back on, but that didn’t help.
I can access iCloud using the web interface, but I’d rather not.
I created another account on my Mac, and set it to use iCloud with the same Apple ID, and it works there fine. So whatever is messed up must be confined to my account. But where? I tried nuking various cache and preference files with “cloud” in their names, but no luck.
I’m using Ventura 13.6.9.
Same errors when booted in Safe Boot mode, same errors when back in normal mode.
I tried completely signing my Mac out of iCloud and signing back in. The errors persist.
The message about a “helper application” inspired me to look at Activity Monitor for related processes. I see that there is a process named com.apple.iCloudHelper belonging to the user account where iCloud Drive works, but no such process for the problematic account.
