Severe problems with all .numbers files that are on iCloud + shared to other people (everyone with link / read only)

Question

Business user here. I didn’t get an answer at discussions@apple so now I am here. I use iCloud for my law office, every client folder has its own Numbers file so it’s at least hundreds of .numbers files that are affected and interfere with my daily work in a devastating way.

Problem is there since some months, another new problem since some 1-4 weeks. Only .numbers files that are on iCloud AND shared to other people (everyone with link / read only) are affected. it is independent of MacOS and device, I have quite a lot of Mac Minis and Macbooks.

This is what happens to -all- of the above mentioned .numbers files:

Their contents are not searchable anymore. This is horrible for me, I rely on numbers values and formulas that give out certain strings that need to be findable with finder or spotlight search. They get only searchable again if I copy the single .numbers file to a non shared place on iCloud AND open, edit anything and save and close them. Only workaround which is horrible for my office.

Alternatively ".nosync" in filename helps too.

Since some weeks: When opening the .numbers files (which is saved on the ssd, so no cloud download necessary) a loading bar of numbers app appears, which takes 10-40 seconds to open one single .numbers file. This destroys my whole workflow. interestingly when going offline and opening the numbers files it opens as usual in miliseconds although this "numbers is offline" pop-up appears.

Problems disappear as soon as I deactivate file sharing and edit & save the numbers files once. So it is reproducible. Sidenote: Other shared files are not affected and are searchable. I don't use .pages files though.

Problem persisted even after changing the MacBook. For general info, I use a MacBook Pro 2023 M3 Pro chip. Latest macOS and .numbers updates.

Answer 1

Whether this is a bug or a feature is not clear to me, but what is most likely happening is you can only search a file if it’s not “optimized” off your Mac’s local storage.

• To test this, find a file you know should be searchable open the file (which insures it is not “optimized” and stored only in the cloud by downloading a full copy of the file locally) and then repeat your search.
• Repeat the test by copying these test files to a new external drive that is formatted the same as your internal Mac storage (APFS most likely) to make sure you don’t have corruption on the files or on the Mac itself that an erase and restore would fix.
• You should report this to Apple as you appear to have this perfectly reproducible and could make test files that exhibit this and Apple engineers could reproduce and fix it if it’s a bug. If it’s some “feature” perhaps they could explain how we are thinking about this tool “wrongly”

If that works, what to do is really up to your specific situation.

1. There are apps to let you try and manage which files are stored locally and which are evicted
2. You could buy a larger drive (new Mac or upgrade what you have) and count on your working set of files not being evicted.
3. You can turn off “optimize storage” and ensure all files fit in the space you have.
4. You could move a copy of all these files to an external drive as well as share a copy of ones for “collaboration” in iCloud to guarantee you can still work with others on most recent files but you always can search old work.
5. You could re-evaluate which cloud collaboration tool meets your needs and offer a web search so you can search files not on your Mac.

Depending on how interested you are in the technical details, you can read some articles that are very well written and some go into exceptional detail on how this all works behind the scenes. The author of many of the articles I will recommend has programs to search better than finder (mints) and apps to manage and see which iCloud files are evicted and which are fully local.

• https://eclecticlight.co/2023/07/19/searching-icloud-drive-with-spotlight/
• https://eclecticlight.co/free-software-menu/ especially Cirrus, Search Key, and Mints

Hopefully, you can pull back temporarily the key files you need to search and can otherwise make an easy call to free up space on your Mac while you decide which long term fix works best for you. Also, perhaps Apple can fix this if it’s only “shared” files to which you lose metadata search.