How Do I Know If A File Has Been Successfully Synced To iCloud Drive? I am trying out iCloud Drive as a potential replacement for Dropbox. One of the nice things about Dropbox is that it produces little green checkmarks on file and folder icons to let the user know that a file or folder has been synced with the Dropbox server:



When I copied several gigabytes of files to my new iCloud Drive folder, there was no indication that files were syncing nor was there any indication of what was and wasn't synced. I did manage to login to my account on iCloud.com where I saw files being added. This solution however is no where near as convenient as seeing the status in Finder. It also does not let me know if an updated existing file has been updated on the server.

My question therefore is, how can I tell if a file has been synced using Finder or any other tool on my computer?
OS X 10.10.2 now has graphical upload progress bars:



When things get stuck, or you have a slower upload, there is a brctl tool that ships with Yosemite to monitor changes in all iCloud backed documents. Open terminal and type the following command:

brctl log --wait --shorten


On macOS Catalina 10.15 use the following command:

brctl log -w --shorten


It will show you a brief summary of the sync changes both up and down. The wait causes it to run continuously until you close the window or issue Control+C to quit brctl process. If you are familiar with the grep command line tool, you could filter the results to just show upload progress, but most iCloud accounts are quite low volume in terms of changes, so your upload of many files will likely dominate the results.

https://www.icloud.com/#iclouddrive

Also, the empirical way to tell if a file is synced is to log in to iCloud drive on the web interface and verify a file and/or folder is up there in the clouds.