I seem to have encountered an account-breaking iCloud bug, and having a hell of a time resolving it.

[Guest /u/toxic9813]

I am trying like hell to get my dad on the iPhone train, I got him an iPhone and an Apple Watch and things have been mostly going smooth. He's got an ancient Mac mini as well, running MacOS 10.15.7.

 

Problem: Can't get iCloud Photos to sync properly on any device

 

On his iPhone, he can't enable the iCloud Photo Library. For some reason, his iCloud account is broken. He's got the iCloud storage from my family plan, he's got a 13 Pro max with the latest software. But the button is completely disabled. We discovered this problem because my dad loves to frequently share large files, and one of the advantages of the apple platform is the seamless "create iCloud link" button and he can send links to his big home videos. But this functionality mysteriously quit working back in July, which is frustrating for all of us. So we tried to make an iCloud link from his old Mac, no dice. if you try to create a shared library from the Photos app, the application will freeze and crash. I tried to adjust some iCloud settings from that Mac mini, and it has broken the connectivity to his iCloud account completely. He cannot log in properly to iCloud any more, only the local account. Mac settings app will just sit indefinitely with the spinning progress wheel of death and not do anything.

 

So, maybe, two things required to fix this. One-- He's trying to back up his Mac mini and format it. Second- We also want to format the iPhone and try to get it back onto iCloud proper.

 

1.) We can't format the mini until we get the files off it it, and since iCloud is broken, we can't upload the files to the 2TB cloud drive. Plus, his internet is shit, and we don't really want to wait for a terabyte of videos to upload manually through the iCloud web portal... if that's even possible. We are trying to get those files migrated to another drive, but the Disk Utility program fucking crashes every time we try to format one of his spare hard drives as MacOS Journaled!!!! So Time Machine won't work (and I'm afraid what malignant software bug has ruined his iCloud account will be carried over if we do that, so that's not on the list anyway) So I am going to physically go over to his house this weekend and bring him a drive that's already formatted for MacOS Journaled filesystem. HOPEFULLY this will work. And we can begin formatting.

 

2.) The Mac mini is too old to interface with the iPhone and perform a local backup. We haven't tried it, but I'm willing to bet a Mac with fuckin' iTunes still installed is not going to accept an iOS 18 device. I am going to have him try an iCloud backup from the iPhone and just cross my fingers that nothing is lost. His photos library is NOT backing up to iCloud, and him losing nearly a year of photos and videos will be very upsetting. I'm open to ideas about how to make a third-party backup of all his media before I pull the trigger. It has occurred to me that if I plug the iPhone into a windows PC, it will allow me to at least pull media off it it like a camera... Right? But without any of the file names. They'll all be jumbled characters. useless, as far as sorting... right?

 

As a 10-year Apple user, I have never seen or heard of any problem that is so fucking complicated to fix. I left behind IT and Windows for this exact goddamn reason! Here I am trying to slog through broken software again like it's 2007 all over again.

 

Anyone know what is going on? Google yields me nothing as far as helpful tricks.

 

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