Our readers are not used to seeing this type of article. However, it offers a peek into the troubles one can encounter, also when working for peace and art – processes that are never revealed in the final text, video or image. The experience involved starting up my Mac and finding only empty folders on its desktop, i.e. the sudden loss of nearly 100,000 documents and files accumulated over decades. I then had to manually retrieve and reorganise it all, and exchange with a formally polite but incompetent pCloud support department that denied any wrongdoing on its side and kept talking about how well it understood my frustration. I also had to consult with AI CoPilot about the technicalities and downloading such huge data volumes from Mac’s iCloud and other places, and much more.
The catastrophe cost me more than 100 working hours over 5 weeks. Now everything is back in order, and I can finally turn to more meaningful and productive tasks. I have felt it my duty to warn everyone who needs cloud services and has Macs: Don’t ever engage with pCloud in Switzerland!
Cloud services promise security, redundancy, and peace of mind. The Swiss pCloud markets itself as a trustworthy European alternative to Big Tech — a place where your files are safe, your backups are reliable, and your digital life is protected for the long term. That promise was the reason I invested in a lifetime plan: to safeguard forty years of work for The Transnational Foundation and my photographic archive over the last 25 years. My two life works.
What happened instead was the opposite of safety.
On my Mac, pCloud’s software removed local files without my consent, replaced originals with cloud‑only placeholders, and continued to manipulate my file system even after I had turned both Backup and Sync off. The behaviour was unpredictable, intrusive, and entirely at odds with what any user would expect from a backup service. A backup should preserve your files, copy them and not take them away.
The deeper problem is architectural. pCloud’s macOS integration behaves less like a backup and more like a fragile mirroring engine. Even when “Backup” is selected — a word that universally implies one‑way, non‑destructive copying — the system acts like Sync, treating the cloud as the master copy and the local machine as secondary. This means that if the software becomes confused, falls out of step, or misinterprets a state change, local files can simply vanish and be replaced by cloud‑only versions. That is exactly what happened to me.
And I am far from alone. Across Apple’s support forums, GitHub, Reddit, and Mac news sites, users describe the same pattern: pCloud Drive freezing, crashing, failing to mount, consuming excessive CPU, or becoming unusable after macOS updates. Apple advisors have even told users that pCloud’s app is “faulty with newer versions of macOS.” These are not isolated anecdotes. They form a consistent picture of a system that is unstable and unsafe on the Mac platform.
My correspondence with pCloud stretched across eight to ten long letters. Throughout most of it, they denied any responsibility, insisted that no files had been removed because they were safe in their cloud (!) and suggested that I had misunderstood their terminology. At some point they unilaterally closed the case.
Only when I informed them that I would close the case by documenting my experience publicly did they finally acknowledge that many users have reported serious macOS instability, that sync inconsistencies can cause local files to disappear, and that the software “should not remove local files without clear user control.” Even then, they avoided the central point: that their system had taken my files off my computer and left me dependent on their servers – but hilariously asked me whether I could help them re-create what had happened so they could better understand what had happened! Obviously believing that I was willing to take that risk a second time…
This avoidance becomes even more troubling when one considers the broader implications and that this is a lifetime subscription:
If pCloud’s servers were ever compromised, destroyed, or rendered inaccessible — through cyber warfare, corporate collapse, or simple technical failure — I would lose everything. A backup system that removes local copies and forces reliance on a single remote server is not a backup at all. It is a single melting point of catastrophic failure.
pCloud’s final advice to me was revealing: they recommended avoiding Backup and Sync entirely for important folders and using only manual uploads instead. In other words, they advised me not to use the very features I had paid for. That alone speaks volumes.
pCloud also refused to offer any refund or compensation, only that I could buy other products at a reduced price. Finally, I should make clear that I work in both the PC and the Mac world, and what I experienced at my Mac did not happen on my PC. But I use only manual uploads now, once a month, and have removed the pCloudDrive, which does intrusive backup and sync even when you have turned them off, from both.
I am sharing this experience because others deserve to know what I learned the hard way. For macOS users — especially photographers, filmmakers, designers, researchers, and anyone who works with large original files — pCloud is not a safe choice. Its behaviour is unpredictable, its architecture is flawed, and its support is ad absurdum evasive when confronted with the consequences.
A backup service must be trustworthy. pCloud, on macOS, is not.
The post When a Backup Steals Your Life’s Work: My Experience with pCloud on macOS appeared first on Dissident Voice.
This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Jan Oberg.