macOS Sonoma 14.4 became available for download on March 7, and as the month drags on, Mac users are finding more and more bugs with the release. The newest one, and the fourth so far, involves iCloud Drive, where saved versions of your files stored in the cloud could be at risk of being deleted.
This iCloud Drive bug was first spotted by Howard Oakley over at the Eclectic Light Company. It’s a pretty scenario-specific bug though, where if you have the Optimize Mac Storage option turned on, you could be losing all of your saved versions. Oakley was alerted of the issue and found that all previous versions will be removed if you choose Remove Downloads when right-clicking on a local file in iCloud Drive. This isn’t the intended behavior, as in prior macOS Sonoma releases, doing this would keep all previous versions of said file. The bug also doesn’t seem to impact macOS Ventura, according to Oakley.
While Apple works on a permanent solution, the workaround to correct the issue is pretty simple for now. You’ll have to disable Optimize Mac Storage in the iCloud Drive settings. It’s suggested to repeat this twice, just to be safe.
As we mentioned before, this is the fourth bug to plague macOS Sonoma 14.4. The most popular bug is with USB Devices not connecting properly over USB hubs. There’s also another issue where printers might not work right. Even Java doesn’t appear to work as intended in macOS Sonoma 14.4, as mentioned by the folks at Oracle.