A client’s Logic Pro 12 projects kept throwing up small “content not found” errors, and he was running them straight from iCloud Drive while it synced.
He’s on a 2023 Mac running macOS Tahoe and had recently upgraded to Logic Pro 12. Since then he’d been getting little errors, such as “content not found”, that would come up and then disappear again. He doesn’t use many samples or sound libraries, but he has a lot of Logic projects, and apart from a few very large bundle files he kept everything in iCloud.
Projects open in iCloud Drive
What stood out on his Mac was where the projects lived. He was opening and saving his Logic projects in iCloud Drive itself, not in a local folder.
With a project open in Logic, you could watch iCloud syncing it to the cloud in real time.
iCloud syncing is handy when you’re editing a photo or a document. When you’re dealing with many gigabytes of content it’s a lot more to keep in step, and I think errors like his are a sign of that. The risk is a corrupted project, and I’ve seen that happen with other clients.
I wouldn’t personally run a project from the iCloud Drive location. If it’s throwing up errors, something’s going wrong. So I suggested he keep his current projects in a dedicated folder on the Mac’s internal drive, and move them to iCloud once he’s finished working on them, perhaps at the end of a session.
Thinking about it afterwards
I’ve had some time to reflect on this one. His Logic sessions run into the hundreds of megabytes, and when they sit in the cloud and back up live, you’re at the mercy of a lot of things you can’t control. When I went over a Pro Tools crash caused by OneDrive with Gemini, it described cloud storage to me as a rented room in the sky where sometimes the landlord changes the locks. I think that fits here too.
Apple has made plenty of changes to macOS over the years, including to how files are saved, and it hasn’t always looked after its pro users. If you’re trusting Apple to have your best interests at heart every time it changes the system, I’d disagree, based on about 20 years of doing this work.
So my advice was to keep the projects he’s working on out of iCloud Drive and to set up a proper backup routine instead:
- A cloud backup service that runs every night, with his Logic sessions closed while the backup is going on.
- A physical backup drive as well, in case something happens to the equipment, because it does happen.
A daily backup to the cloud is a very convenient thing to have, and I’m sharing these thoughts with him so he has what I’d consider good professional advice on it.
Keep the Logic projects you’re working on in a local folder, and let a nightly backup put copies in the cloud.
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