iCloud Silently Evicted 69 Article Files and Killed 4 Days of Publishing: EDEADLK and a read_text_resilient Design

Every one of my publishing lanes went dark for four days, and every script involved exited with status 0. Nothing had crashed. The files themselves had quietly stopped existing on disk — macOS had uploaded them to iCloud and deleted the local copies to "optimize storage." Why This Matters What it means for automation to depend on its environment When you run 160+ launchd jobs around the clock, the execution environment itself becomes a failure source before your script logic does. Ports get exhausted, processes orphan and pile up, memory never frees — I wrote about that class of resource leak last time. This is a completely different kind of total failure that happened the very next day. The files had become fatal to read . Not a bug in my code. Not a filesystem bug. An unintended side effect of a mechanism macOS runs under the name "optimization." What optimize-storage actually does macOS's "Optimize Storage" (System Settings → General → Storage → Optimize Storage), on a machine with iCloud Drive enabled, uploads files under Desktop and Documents to iCloud and deletes the local copies when free disk space gets tight . In Finder they still look like normal icons, but there is no local data — they are in a "dataless" state. Click one and it downloads automatically. For a human user, that's an acceptable tradeoff. The problem is automation scripts. python3 's open() , pathlib.Path.read_text() , cat , jq , cp — all of them die instantly on a dataless file with Errno 11: EDEADLK: Resource deadlock avoided . The name "Resource deadlock" makes you suspect a deadlock, but this is a POSIX errno code that macOS repurposes to mean "waiting for a file download." No lock is contended. No thread is stuck. The mere fact that "the data isn't local" surfaces to the process as a fatal error code. You can also get EAGAIN (resource temporarily unavailable). That one shows up as a race right after a download starts. The actual damage: four days of zero posts On August 6, 2026, note's a