Beware of this iCloud Pitfall when it comes to Xcode and your Projects

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I have been an Apple developer since the iPhone came out in 2007. I’ve used Xcode in its many forms, have had my ups and downs with the development tool for years, but always find my way back to it after trying some other development platforms.

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Over the past year, I have been noticing that some of my Xcode projects have been inflating in size. From a 12mb to a 50mb project after I added some minor features and enhancements. After some investigating (and bitching on the Apple Developer’s forums) it wasn’t until a fellow developer suggested that maybe it was iCloud helping to cause the problem. After looking into that – I found out that IT WAS.

So, what was the problem?

With iCloud enabled, it makes a backup of your folders often, always verifying which one is new and which is old – which is the way its supposed to work. But I found out that isn’t always the case when it comes to Xcode, and may eventually lead to duplicate files.

Example:

You may have A Xcode project named MyClients containing files within that project. Each time you change that file, Xcode writes those changes to the file and then iCloud sees a change and copies it to its folder in the cloud. The problem may lie with those changes getting saved to the file and iCloud making a copy of it to send it to its server, leading to that file making a duplicate of itself.

Example: info.plist, info1.plist, info2.plist, etc.

How did I come up with this conclusion?

When I told iCloud not to backup the folder where the project was in, the problem did NOT happen. I now rely on Time Machine and Google Drive for my project backups.

Questions? Please ask below.