I wanted to share my experience of losing the BLOC project file for the most important Blocs project I’ve ever worked on — BlocsMaster.com
I dedicated months to this project, replacing Podia with the built-in Sitelok solution and self-hosting videos, among other things.
Tragically, I lost the file because it was somehow overwritten during iCloud syncing with the much older version (which had the same name). This week, I had to reinstall the system, and I noticed that the file was an extremely old version. I’ll need to recreate this website, likely from scratch.
Anyway, I strongly advise against relying solely on iCloud. Always ensure that you back up your important files!
Something similar has happened to me before, and it’s extremely frustrating…
I’ve kept iCloud turned off ever since.
The built-in backup feature in Blocs is set to “every 5 minutes,” and on top of that, ARQ Backup regularly saves the project data to external cloud storage and to a server folder on the local network. Especially in the final stages of a project, when there are still lots of little details to tweak, you really don’t need that kind of thing.
I’m so sorry Eldar as I’m sure that’s enough to wreck your weekend. For a second I wasn’t sure I was in the right place as in one of my coding forums this is unfortunately a semi-regular topic for projects.
Any chance that you might have other devices that sync with iCloud that might be offline? You could try ensuring they stay offline (quickly turn off Wi-Fi, Cellular, etc.) to keep them from syncing and try and recover the correct file(s) before they get overwritten.
Might be good opportunity to investigate a long term backup strategy. I’m fond of something that’s automatic and is on-site (quick & close to bare metal recovery) as well as off-site (just in case there’s a on-site disaster like a fire).
I love the iCloud Drive, and nothing like that has ever happened to me before.
But yeah, I will definitely be much more careful going forward.
What could have saved me is if Blocs had a backup to iCloud instead of locally. I could browse and restore the previous versions of the documents and files that support this feature (like Pages, etc). Perhaps @norm could work his magic to implement this functionality for Blocs projects in the future, especially since we have Blocs for iPad.
Yeah, I don’t have time to work on rebuild of this website right away, and thankfully the live version works great for now, just can’t update it in any meaningful way until I create the new BLOC project file.
Any chance that you might have other devices that sync with iCloud that might be offline?
That was the first thing I checked. I actually lost the file because I opened it on the iPad, and then the syncing somehow messed up the dates. As a result, I ended up with the file, which says the ‘last modified date’ is in the future (in June). It’s crazy how that happened, but the result is that every version I saved before that was dismissed. Now, I’m stuck with the Blocs Master project from years ago, which says it was saved 2 months in the future
This is EXACTLY what I did. I back up to this external drive while using blocs, and every night Carbon Copy Cloner makes yet another back of all of my web files.
I’ve seen too many issues with iCloud Drive to use it for much. Using other Cloud storage options may also have challenges. For example I’m using pCloud, works quite well. But make sure you save to a regular APFS or HFS+ folder that’s synced (instead of directly to pCloud’s own filesystem). When I saved to pCloud’s own filesystem (not sure if their current version is built upon FUSE, like previous versions), the backups Blocs made, grew the resource fork part to 4.4 GB for every project backup file. So even if the project was 3 MB the backup files used lots of gigabytes.
I’m really sorry to hear that @Eldar (although it is late to answer).
It’s not a privilege of iCloud. I had once the same thing happening with another cloud service, kDrive. On which I keep all my clients projects since years. Impossible to retrieve a backup, as if there has been some time lost in space. In between one day at 6pm to the next day at 1pm. I had made change on a Blocs Project in the morning which I never was able to restore.
Although I had Time Machine, a daily backup of clients folder on an extrernal hard drive.
Anyway in my case it was 1 or 2 hours of work lost. In yours, it is another story !
After that, during 2-3 days, I was keeping locally the Blocs project. But now, months later, I’m back on working only with the kDrive. And it never occured again .
Thanks for sharing! I’ve definitely become more cautious now, even though I still use iCloud.
I’m still unsure about how to approach rebuilding the Blocs Master website. For now, it’s functioning perfectly, so perhaps I’ll hold off until I’m ready to completely rebuild it with a new design and structure. It’ll take weeks of work…
As blocmaster.com still works well, I would suggest leave it as it is and wait a technological breakthrough, or a major upgrade to Blocs to rebuild it from scratch. An alternative would be to use AI such as Claude Code or Google AI Studio, prompting it to rebuild this website with Sitelok and other details for the prompt.
They could “easily” build a Bootstrap website but for a Blocs project, I don’t know.
Yes, I’ve been using AI to create incredible (complex) websites in the past few weeks (with Claude Design and Claude Code). The web design industry is about to significantly change very soon.
Rather interested as to why you feel it’s still yet to arrive, especially when people take into account other current offerings besides blocs and throughout the industry’s as a whole?
Exactly. If you are in industry, adoption should have already happened, various tools have been readily available for a long time now, and without the propriety limitation that leaves you in the situation of the OP.
This is a painful lesson that a lot of us have learned with iCloud and creative apps. The core issue is that iCloud can silently “optimize” storage and sync at any time, including during saves — which creates a race condition between the local and cloud version. For Blocs specifically, I’d suggest keeping the project file outside of iCloud Drive entirely, in a local folder, and then using a separate backup tool (like Time Machine or a dedicated backup app) to snapshot it regularly. That way you get proper version history without relying on iCloud’s sometimes unpredictable sync behavior.
I’m really interested in your comment about using Claude AI. How are you managing to integrate Blocs with Claude? What kind of sections or components are you building or generating with Claude and Blocs? It would be really interesting to hear about your experience and how you’re making that work.
In my case, I’m exploring the Plone project (plone.org) and generating things with Claude as well — similar to what you’re doing with Blocs, but using Volto. I’m creating blocks for Volto that don’t require recompiling, making the process smoother. I’ve already built a few blocks that have helped Plone work better from a design perspective (GitHub - RenteriaMX/MF-Blocks-Manager · GitHub) . But now I’m trying to work with Blocs and then directly integrate the result into Plone. I’m trying to develop an MCP that could help with this. However, as you mentioned, sometimes new ideas open up paths to integrate Blocs into future projects.
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that leaves you in the situation of the OP.