Voice Memos sync to MacBook Pro via iCloud

Voice Memos and iCloud+: I have a decent (not huge) amount of them, just under a GB worth of data (over more than 10 years) -- on my iPhone everything seems fine, including (and this is where I got the data usage from) iCloud sync ("...securely stored in iCloud and available to sync..."), BUT on my MBP, I can *see* all the memos, but some of them appear corrupted (truncated) and also, are actually truncated (some to 0), AND on icloud.com (within Drive / Voice Memos) I can see a single random memo file, and that's it. To this date, again, over the years, I haven't noticed issues this critical with any other app's sync to iCloud (and back). Thanks for help.

p.s. You're welcome to speak to me at any technical level. I'm withholding my emotional assessment of the situation as an IT professional (and a veteran pro Pear user that has seen a lot, but... I can't even).

iPhone 13 mini

Posted on Dec 1, 2025 2:31 PM

Reply
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Posted on Dec 8, 2025 2:36 AM

Force macOS to re-download the audio

This sometimes works.


On the Mac:

  1. Quit Voice Memos
  2. Open Finder → iCloud Drive
  3. Right-click → Reload iCloud Drive (or toggle iCloud Drive off/on)


Then:

  1. Go to System Settings → Apple ID → iCloud → iCloud Drive → Options
  2. Toggle Voice Memos OFF → wait → ON again
  3. Reopen Voice Memos
  4. Click each corrupted memo (one at a time) and watch if size changes in the Recording folder


This makes macOS issue a new fetch request to CloudKit.

Works only if iCloud actually has full audio blob copies.

2 replies
Question marked as Top-ranking reply

Dec 8, 2025 2:36 AM in response to mouldwarp

Force macOS to re-download the audio

This sometimes works.


On the Mac:

  1. Quit Voice Memos
  2. Open Finder → iCloud Drive
  3. Right-click → Reload iCloud Drive (or toggle iCloud Drive off/on)


Then:

  1. Go to System Settings → Apple ID → iCloud → iCloud Drive → Options
  2. Toggle Voice Memos OFF → wait → ON again
  3. Reopen Voice Memos
  4. Click each corrupted memo (one at a time) and watch if size changes in the Recording folder


This makes macOS issue a new fetch request to CloudKit.

Works only if iCloud actually has full audio blob copies.

Voice Memos sync to MacBook Pro via iCloud

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