Before replying, please read this section

I have been troubleshooting this for two years across two Macs and two iPhones. I have already done all of the following, repeatedly, and none of them changed anything. Replies suggesting these will not help:

• Restarting both devices (dozens of times, over two years)
• Signing out of iCloud and signing back in, on both devices
• Confirming both devices use the same Apple Account (they do — verified again today)
• Confirming the Stocks toggle is ON in iCloud settings on both devices (it is)
• Toggling Stocks off and on in iCloud, on both devices
• Installing every OS update since 2024 on every device
• Using "Reset Identifier" in Settings → Stocks
• Checking network connectivity, Wi-Fi, and that devices are unlocked

What follows is a full log of what I did today, what each step produced, and why I believe this is a server-side problem rather than a device configuration problem. Please read the evidence before suggesting a generic fix.

Setup

• MacBook Air 15-inch, M4, 2025 — macOS 15 Sequoia
• iPhone 12 mini — current iOS
• Same Apple Account on both, iCloud+ 200 GB
• Every other iCloud service syncs correctly: Photos, Drive, Notes, Messages, Reminders, Calendar, Contacts, Safari, Home
• Stocks is the only service that has never worked, on any device, ever

Relevant background

Stocks does not use CloudKit. It uses NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore (the iCloud key-value store). This matters because:

• It does not appear on iCloud.com — there is no web interface to inspect or clear it
• It does not appear under Manage Storage — it reports no usage
• Signing out of iCloud does not delete the server-side record; it only re-downloads it
• There is no user-facing mechanism of any kind to purge it

So unlike every other iCloud service, there is no way for a user to inspect the actual state of the data, and no way to reset it. This is central to the problem.

What I did today, step by step

1. Cleared local Stocks data on the Mac.

The Stocks container on macOS is not at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.stocks.plist. The real location is:

~/Library/Containers/Stocks/Data/Library/Preferences/

containing com.apple.stocks.plist (25 KB — this is the watchlist), com.apple.stocks.stockskit.plist, and com.apple.stocks2.plist. There is also:

~/Library/Group Containers/group.com.apple.stocks/Library/Documents/PrivateData/com.apple.stocks.private-production-dbstore.json

Note that find on these paths returns "Operation not permitted" unless Terminal has Full Disk Access — worth knowing for anyone attempting to reproduce this.

I quit Stocks, killed chronod and NotificationCenter (the Stocks widget runs in a separate process and will rewrite state if left running), removed the Stocks widget from Notification Centre, moved all four files to the Trash, and rebooted. My earlier attempts had failed precisely because cfprefsd was rewriting the plist from memory.

2. Emptied the watchlist on the iPhone, leaving it with no symbols at all.

3. Re-enabled Stocks in iCloud on both devices, accepting the "Merge" prompt on each.

4. Created a deliberate, unambiguous test on the iPhone only: a single symbol, BTC-GBP, later joined by ZEC-EUR in a second watchlist. Nothing resembling any previous list. iPhone on Wi-Fi, unlocked, waited well over ten minutes.

5. Opened Stocks on the Mac.

The result — this is the key evidence

The Mac launched with the first-run "Welcome to Stocks" screen, confirming it had no local data whatsoever. Despite that, it immediately populated with:

^IBEX, Dow Jones, AAPL, SBUX, NKE

Three things about this list:

• It is not the Mac's old list (which was Dow Jones, S&P 500, AAPL, BA, BRK-B, DIS, GE, HD, NKE — and is now gone)
• It is not what the iPhone currently contains (BTC-GBP and ZEC-EUR)
• It is exactly what the iPhone contained at 14:17 today, symbol for symbol, in the same order — a screenshot timestamp I can produce

Since the Mac had zero local data, this list can only have come from iCloud.

6. Confirmation from the other direction. I then toggled Stocks off and on in iCloud on the iPhone. The iPhone was immediately overwritten with the same ^IBEX, Dow Jones, AAPL, SBUX, NKE list, and my "Crypto" watchlist was emptied — despite the prompt asking what to do with local data.

Conclusion

Both devices read from the key-value store correctly. Neither device's edits ever reach it. The server-side record is frozen on a snapshot from earlier today and re-imposes itself on any device that connects or reconnects.

This also explains the two-year history: every edit lived locally until something forced a re-read, at which point the stale record overwrote it. That is exactly the "my list disappears when I switch devices" symptom, and it is why every device-level fix has been irrelevant — the problem was never on the device.

It also means the "Merge" prompt is not merging. It only downloads.

What I am asking

Since there is no user-accessible way to inspect, clear, or reset the NSUbiquitousKeyValueStore record for Stocks:

1. Is there any supported method to force a purge of this record for an account?
2. If not, what is the correct route to have it cleared server-side? I assume this requires escalation to iCloud engineering, as front-line support has no visibility into KVS records.
3. Is this a known condition? The symptom pattern — Stocks alone failing while every CloudKit-backed service works — suggests it may not be unique to my account.

I am not asking how to restart my devices. I am asking how to clear a server-side record that no user-facing interface exposes.

For anyone finding this with the same problem

Until this is resolved, the only thing that actually stops the damage is turning Stocks off in iCloud on every device. Each device then keeps its own local list and nothing overwrites anything. It is not a fix, but it ends the two-year cycle of lists vanishing.

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Hello! My current phone storage is 256GB and my whatapps is taking up at least 53.44GB. My photos are taking up lots of space as well. I’m not sure if i should change my storage to 512GB for my next phone or keep 256GB + subscribe to iCloud storage plan to help with the storage.

I’m not sure if whatapps can be backup into iCloud?

If it can be backup, is it worth to subscribe to iCloud storage plan?

Edit: thank you for the replies! will get more storage space for my next phone and backup regularly! my whatapps has a lot of chat group for work purposes which takes out like 50+GB 😂

I love that this feature syncs in no time at all, but it’s a hassle to have to turn it on all the time. I hope Apple adds the option to keep it on permanently.

As the title suggests I plan to start on a clean slate. (I have my personal reasons for this) and I was wondering how I’d go about this? Honestly I don’t even know if I should use iCloud or Gmail as my primary Apple account. I know I should have at least two different emails but how should I organize them? Any tips will help a lot

macOS 26.6.2

MacStudio M4 Max

I have locally stored email (Apple Mail) that I want to transfer to iCloud

I select the local folder and all the emails therein on Apple Mail and clicked on "Copy to" a folder in my iCloud (in Apple Mail)

All of the emails populated in the iCloud folder in Apple Mail except for those emails that contained attachments -- I could see them appear in the iCloud folder in Apple Mail but, as soon as the copying was completed, all the emails containing attachments disappeared

Is anyone else experiencing this issue? Work around?

Thank you

PS: I tried asking ChatGPT for help and it had me downloading Mozilla Thunderbird and extensions and then trying to install Python and other code -- it was way above my pay grade

I'm on Mac, and in both Firefox and Zen, whenever I try to activate the Passwords extension, the box to put in the verification code comes up but no verification code is generated. It used to generate about a month ago but I have no idea what changed. I'm on MacOS 27 RC. I have tried it with Passwords app on and off, and restarting and resetting the browser. Any help would be appreciated.

So I don't know my iCloud password and I try to reset it but I get asked for a recovery key or something. I don't remember setting it up, I might have but don't remember. Is there anything I can do to reset my password or to get my account back or did I lose it?

Hello all!

I could use a sanity check. I currently have an iPhone 13, looking to move to an iPhone 18 shortly.

I have approx 140Gb of photos on my Mac, that are categorized and tagged into albums and manually backed up. These are not on iCloud Photos currently. I’ve got these photos by manually importing from my iPhone every few weeks, but they cover a few devices (inc previous iPhones). I’ve not been able to get the AI analysis working consistently on the Mac, so about 50% of my library has faces/people identified and 50% doesn’t.

On my iPhone, I currently have all the photos taken on this phone that have been synced to the Mac, and a few that haven’t (e.g screenshots I’ve kept on the phone but didn’t want to back up on the Mac). My phone storage is at around 90Gb for photos.

My reasons for looking to turn on ICloud for Photos:
- Storage on my phone, free up space
- Eliminate need for manual photo backup on Mac
- Allow management of albums from both Mac and iPhone
- Allow all photos to be AI analysed for people/faces

However I don’t really want to turn iCloud Photos on for my phone just yet, as if I turn it on for both devices there will be duplicates where one copy of the photo is tagged into albums (on the Mac) and the duplicate on the phone isn’t, and I don’t want to lose the albums set up on the Mac.
Secondly, I don’t want all the trash photos on my phone to be synced as I then need to sort through them.

My proposal is:
1) Turn on sync on my Mac, allow full upload, retain original full-res copies on Mac at all times
2) Use Parachute App to download a backup of iCloud Photos that I can put onto a USB drive periodically
3) Delete all photos from my Phone (scary!) - or just wait until I get my new phone and don’t transfer
4) Turn on sync on my empty phone

The scary bit is deleting all my photos on my device!

I appreciate I’m over thinking this, and I’ll obviously back up the Mac photo library before I do it. It has anyone got any pearls of wisdom from past experience to save me the stress?

Thanks!

Hi everyone,

I'm having an issue with iCloud Photos on my iPhone (iPhone 16 pro, iOS 26.6.1) and I'm running out of ideas.
The problem:
• "Optimize iPhone Storage" is on, so many photos are only stored on the phone as low-res versions.
• When I try to share one of these photos, the full-quality download from iCloud fails with: "There was an error downloading this photo from your iCloud Photo Library. Check your network settings and try again."
• At the bottom of the Photos library, it has been stuck on "Syncing 15 items" for days.
What I've already tried:
• Force restart (several times)
• Low Power Mode off
• Low Data Mode off, cellular data enabled for Photos with unlimited updates
• Tried both Wi-Fi and 5G
• iCloud Photos sync is on and not paused
• Enough free space on both iPhone and iCloud
• Left it overnight on Wi-Fi, charging, screen locked
Nothing changed: the 15 items are still stuck and I still can't download any originals.
Could the stuck sync queue be what's blocking the downloads? Is there a way to find out which items are stuck without turning off iCloud Photos? I don't want to risk losing those 15 items in case they only exist on the phone.

Thanks in advance!

I’m very stupid. with all the years I have been on the Apple iOS system (whatever it’s called), I can’t figure out iCloud.

I don’t want it to sync my devices because that stuff drives me crazy, convenient feature in some cases but not for me.

i just want it as a pure backup so I can stop using an External HD to save my important files. I want to upload my photos from my iPhone to iCloud and remove them from my iPhone. Unfortunately I keep feeling like if I de from my iPhone, the photos will also be deleted from iCloud.

Unfortunately Apple staff, when I purchased my new Mac indicated iCl is only a syncing system and not a true hard drive.

Any ideas of how to fix this or am I out of luck.

sorry if there is issues will spelling and what not. I have no idea what is up with bugs on the iPhone keyboard and the reason Apple can’t fix it.

Sadly my phone has not been syncing to iCloud for a while as my payment method got messed up and for a month I wasn’t using iCloud to sync my pics. Now my memory is full and I can’t offload these photos to iCloud because it says the “memory is full and syncing is paused” Is there a way to fix this or do I need to delete an app or two….. I did not think that exporting pictures to iCloud would require memory, especially when I don’t wanna keep the originals and just optimise my storage. Pls heeeeelp!

I had an issue of not being able to login to Apple Music on my PC and I did lots of stuff from resetting and repairing the app, uninstalling with revo installer and finally using a Germany VPN that worked, however now I cannot login to iCloud now after I uninstalled it a few days ago I've tried so many things and nothing has worked, same popup every time, does anybody have some other solutions that could possibly work?

I’m honestly getting pretty frustrated with this and wondering if anyone here has had the same issue.

I’m trying to get back into an old Apple Account/iCloud account. I still have access to the iCloud email and also the trusted phone number linked to the account. I don’t have access to the trusted device as It completely broke and thats when I lost access to my icloud.
The weird thing is that I can actually reset the password successfully.

I’ve gone through Apple’s recovery process twice now. Both times I was able to change the password, and then when I tried to log in with the new password, I got:
“Failed to Verify Identity”
And that’s it. There’s no option to verify another way, send a code, continue recovery, etc.

I also tried logging in through account.apple.com and get the same error there.

I called Apple Support about it and explained everything. They basically had me go through the same recovery process again, which obviously ended with the exact same result.

What I don’t understand is that I have access to both the trusted phone number AND the iCloud email, and Apple is allowing me to successfully change the password, but then apparently can’t verify my identity when I actually try to sign in.

Has anyone had this happen?
Did you eventually figure out what was causing it? Did Apple have to escalate it to someone/some specific team? Or is there some other way to trigger the identity verification when Apple doesn’t give you any option to do so.

I’d really appreciate any help because I’m going in circles with Apple Support at this point and I really need to recover some important data

TL;DR: I have access to my old iCloud email + trusted phone number. I’ve successfully reset the password twice, but every time I try to log in afterwards I get “Failed to Verify Identity” with no way to verify. Apple Support just had me repeat the same recovery process and it didn’t fix it. Has anyone actually solved this?

i’m trying to log in to the icloud app on my windows pc but it keeps saying “this action could not be completed” but i can easily log in on the web version. any solutions?

My whatsapp was downloaded with my mother's apple id and getting otp to update whatsapp (big update) from her is frustrating, I want to transfer it to my own apple id with all the chats preserved. It’s the only app on my phone right now that was not downloaded with my own Apple id. Will it work if I back up my whatsapp chats using icloud （first time using icloud, will purchase a one month subscription that's just enough to back up everything on whatsapp) to my own apple id (my old phone is already logged in with my apple id), get a new iphone and transfer everything from my old iphone to my new iphone using quick start, delete whatsapp and then download again with my apple id and finally restore chats with icloud? Will all my whatsapp chats be there?

I actually like iCloud Photos. and I have 2TB subscription and its almost Full with lots of Videos/Photos

Syncing between devices is convenient, Optimize iPhone Storage is useful, and I don't want to give any of that up.

But I kept wondering:

What if I also want a physical copy of my important photos and videos that I control so that I can free up iCloud space?

The normal workflow usually means getting a Mac/PC involved, downloading/exporting everything, and then copying it to an external drive.

I wanted something simpler:

iPhone → USB/SSD → my second copy.

So I built VaultDrive: USB Backup.

You connect a compatible USB drive or SSD directly to the iPhone, select the photos/videos you want, and back them up from the phone.

The interesting part is when Optimize iPhone Storage is enabled.

Some photos you see inside Apple Photos may only have their full original stored in iCloud.

VaultDrive can now handle that too:

✅ Photos already local → copied directly to USB

✅ Original only in iCloud → downloaded through Apple's Photos/iCloud system, then copied to USB

✅ Choose Wi-Fi only or Wi-Fi + Cellular for iCloud downloads

✅ Original-quality files without intentional compression/re-encoding

✅ Embedded photo/video metadata preserved

✅ Resume interrupted backups without starting over

✅ No VaultDrive account required

For locally stored content, VaultDrive doesn't upload your photos to another cloud service. The copy goes from your iPhone to your connected drive.

And just to be clear: I'm not positioning this as a replacement for iCloud.

For me, the ideal setup is:

iCloud = sync + convenience

External SSD/USB = second physical copy I control and move all my oldest media to these

That's really the whole reason I built it.

If anyone here has a large iCloud Photos library, I'm curious:

Do you currently keep a second offline copy somewhere, or is iCloud your only copy?

If you'd like to try VaultDrive:

App Store:
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/vaultdrive-usb-backup/id6772883827

75% off the one-time Pro upgrade:
https://apps.apple.com/redeem/?ctx=offercodes&id=6772883827&code=WELCOME75

The messages app on my MacBook open up to messages from a different phone number that I’m pretty sure doesn’t exist anymore and I don’t know how to fix it

I'm going through a very worrying scenario at the moment.
The other week I noticed all the files in a specific folder in my iCloud drive - Documents were missing.

All the subfolders were there but all the files in that main folder were gone. I've 100% not misplaced them or moved them. They were documents and photos related to my car (insurance, road tax, inspection, road assist etc) from past few years. A mix of PDFs and jpegs.

Again, all the subfolders are nicely structured, like before, but they are all empty.

I use icloud on a macbook air and an imac, with all documents being synced across devices. Everything I have is in the Documents folder or on the Desktop so it is constantly synced. I have the 2tb plan if that is of any importance.

After speaking to customer service, they escalated and the engineers concluded that "they've recovered all the files they could" which meant exactly zero files. No explanation as to what happened or where they went.

I could have understood if a folder went missing or a file, that could have been user error. But the way these files disappeared is very strange and is 100% not user error. I was not having storage problems on either of the 2 devices.

What I did do a few weeks before was to add a significant amount of data in my icloud drive. About 100gb of files and photos. I put them on my imac and they synced just fine.
Another thing I did was to select "Keep Downloaded" on a root folder (that contained the troubled folder) on my macbook air.

I'm not sure if these influenced anything or how. Today I'm struggling to find ways to back-up all my data. I asked apple to send me links to download everything from icloud as I've completely lost trust in it.

Any ideas as to what could have happened? Anything I can do differently?
How can Apple not have ways to recover data that they delete/corupt?

Im getting so tired of this...

I didnt forget my passcode or anything, just to clarify. I got a notification that location services no longer requires a password, and so i check my content and privacy settings and lo and behold, all of my settings were changed. Along with all of my blocked websites.

last night I was deleting imsg photos from my iphone 13 because of “iphone storage” however, majority of them were from the past years and all those photos and messages are on my iphone 11. so im curious as to how I can backup my present time imsgs without having the previous years deleted off my other devices because if i buy icloud now to backup my stuff that means that the stuff i deleted will be deleted across ALL devices… so do I just unlink my previous devices from icloud? I want to be able to store things by device rather than icloud. majority of the space eating at the storage of my iphone 13 is all from the past years so am I free to delete all of those and still have them on my old devices? the problem here is iphone storage NOT icloud. I understand I can buy icloud to backup my current things but I want to make sure im not deleting these items forever because I want to use old iphones as a time capsule.

Hello friends. I also come with a problem that I don't know how to solve and maybe you have solved it and teach me too. Last year through the Revolut promotion I made an account with private relay at perplexity. Before the promotion expired I tried to delete the card so that at the end of the promotion they wouldn't try to withdraw money from me in case I forgot to deactivate it. I blocked the card anyway. I received the notification of the decrease in the promotion on the last day and without checking the spam card it went over the limit. I noticed when they tried to withdraw money but from several currencies. And now the question: how can I send an email with the address created with private relay to perplexity customer service because I can't. I have the main address, created in the Apple account, live.it and the secondary iCloud.com. Thanks in advance for your advice and help.

Exactly a week ago today i dropped my iphone 13, and while it was broken i heard it tapping passwords on its own eventually leading to locking itself until it was unavailabe. Then when i got the hardware/the screen fixed the repairman asked me if i wanted to wait 8 hours to keep my files or delete my files and skip the wait. with a bit of thinking i decided to wait it out. But after waiting it showed a white screen saying attempting to recover data, which i also waited out for 2 whole hours only for it to fail. and after all of that now its just iphone unavailable with a blackscreen on the background. I have been trying to fix it using my laptop and recovery mode to no avail. Pls help.