iCloud Cloud Sync

Feature Requests
1

Problem/Justification
Currently, TrueNAS lacks the ability to natively synchronise with iCloud Drive for cloud sync tasks. This limitation forces users to rely on manual workarounds or third-party tools, which can be cumbersome and less secure. As iCloud is a widely used cloud storage provider, adding first-party support would improve usability and broaden the platform’s appeal to users within the Apple ecosystem. TrueNAS uses rclone under the hood for cloud sync, and rclone now supports iCloud Drive as a provider. This presents an opportunity to integrate iCloud Drive support into TrueNAS easily by leveraging this existing functionality.

Impact
The addition of first-party iCloud Drive support would enable seamless integration for users who rely on Apple services, increasing the flexibility and adoption of TrueNAS as a centralised storage solution.

Disadvantages: Development and maintenance of this feature could require additional resources, though leveraging rclone’s existing iCloud Drive provider mitigates this effort.

User Story
As a TrueNAS user, I want to synchronise my data with iCloud Drive directly from the TrueNAS interface. This would allow me to:

  1. Configure iCloud Drive as a cloud sync provider within the TrueNAS web interface.
  2. Set up automated synchronisation tasks to upload, download, or mirror files.
  3. Monitor sync tasks and logs for troubleshooting.
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2

Be sure to vote for your own suggestion. I’d like to see this too.

3

From the rclone GitHub page:

“Advanced Data Protection (ADP) is currently unsupported and needs to be disabled.”

This makes rclone a non-starter for me. However, I’m curious about how well it works, even just from the CLI. Apple is notorious for restricting functionality to its own tools. While I completely agree with @dcrdev and would love to see this implemented, I’m skeptical about trusting such a solution. For example, the documentation mentions that tokens expire and require manual re-authentication, which feels cumbersome.

Zero Trust encryption (ADP) is crucial to me when entrusting sensitive data to any cloud provider. Disabling ADP is not an option.

One solution I’ve found is using Syncthing.

I run Syncthing on several macOS hosts, each tied to a different iCloud account. Syncthing monitors changes in the iCloud folder on each Mac and replicates them to corresponding Syncthing containers / encrypted datasets. This setup is paired with 180 daily snapshots, which have been invaluable. The snapshots allow me to recover data far beyond the 30-day limit for iCloud’s deleted items bin. This approach has worked reliably for me.

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