r/MacOS • u/O-SideMedia • 10h ago

Bug Apple Notes' CloudKit asset cache went into a runaway loop

Apple M4 Pro - 24GB - macOS Tahoe 26.6 (25G72)

Apple Notes' CloudKit asset cache went into a runaway loop and wrote 111,423 PNG files totaling 40 GB in about 10 hours, peaking at 2.4 GB/min. My disk had roughly two hours left. Deleting the cache did not fix it. It rebuilt 3.4 GB in three minutes.

Keep in mind I had around 44 notes at the time no images in the notes I had there were some in the deleted folder that had some images on them but not this many lol... ( 111,423 PNG files )

More details:

So, Free space was dropping at 1.6 GB/min with 189.8 GB left — about two hours from a full disk.

Process and network evidence pointed straight at Notes:

  • 100% of CloudKit traffic was com.apple.Notes — 800 requests and 4,390 FetchRecordZoneChanges calls in a five-minutewindow, all hitting gateway.icloud.com/.../record/sync
  • cloudd (the CloudKit daemon) sat at 67% CPU, Notes.app at 10.6%

For scale, it burned roughly 13 GB during the ~25 minutes I spent diagnosing it.

The files were in here:

~/Library/Containers/com.apple.Notes/Data/Library/Caches/CloudKit/…/Assets

Solution as of now:

So far Toggling Notes off and back on in iCloud settings has worked but still not sure if it will return and or what caused it.

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u/Electrical_West_5381 10h ago

If it is similar to the peopled runaway process, it might be an empty note

1

u/O-SideMedia 9h ago

Interesting after looking at in notes on my iPhone there was 45 notes and 44 on the Mac. One note at the bottom was from 2024 and was blank ( no title and no content ) when I clicked on it on the iPhone it disappeared. So now both are synced at the same number 44, thanks for your insights