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Documents and Desktop folders not appearing on ...

When I opened up my Mac today my Documents and Desktop folders were missing. In iCloud in Settings iCloud Drive is checked and Options show Desktop & Documents Folders checked. As I have sufficient storage on my Mac I've not optimized my storage there. If I go to iCloud.com all my documents and desktop files are there OK.

I thought I could correct this by restoring files from my Time Machine backup so I tried restoring all my desktop files. That was OK at first but then it started uploading these to iCloud and they disappeared again from my Mac! It seems that somehow or other my iCloud settings are not held properly but how do I correct this?

Do you see an option in your Finder Sidebar to show Desktop

https://www.macworld.com/article/3098804/data-center-cloud/how-to-use-icloud-driv e-s-new-desktop-and-documents-access-in-…

https://www.imore.com/how-save-your-desktop-and-documents-folder-icloud-drive-mac os-sierra

Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive - Apple Support

Both Desktop and Documents appear in the sidebar under iCloud Drive but if I click on either nothing shows up. After I restored the Desktop I could see all the entries but then they started to disappear.

Might be a corrupt .plist.

Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.

Quit the application.

Go to Finder and select your user/home folder. With that Finder window as the front window, either select Finder/View/Show View options or go command - J.  When the View options opens, check ’Show Library Folder’. That should make your user library folder visible in your user/home folder.  Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist.  Move the .plist to your desktop.

Restart the computer, open the application, and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.

If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer one.

Thanks to leonie for some information contained in this.

Then try resetting iCloud Drive/Options.

You've enable Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive. What you see is what is expected. The Desktop & Documents folders now "appear" in iCloud Drive. If you are not seeing them in the iCloud Drive section in the Sidebar, that is another matter that needs to be investigated (as others are trying to do).

The only way to get your Desktop and Documents folders showing again in your Home folder is to disable Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive.

• It will warn you that if you disable it, the files will remain on iCloud Drive, but you will have Empty Desktop and Documents folders in your Home folder. It will also tell you that you can then move the files from iCloud Drive back into the Folders in your Home.
• When you attempt to do that, it will warn you that you will be removing the files from iCloud Drive and they will only be available on your Mac.

All of that moving is just obfuscation. Your Desktop & Documents folders still reside where they were with the files in them. Finder just makes it look like they are not there and in iCloud Drive instead.

When you disable the feature, it makes hard links* to the files in iCloud Drive's local storage location and then deletes the files from the now-visible Desktop and Documents. When you copy the files back over, it doesn't really copy them (or move them), it just creates new hard links in your home folders. The copy will be relatively instantaneous unless some of the files were "optimized" and are only available on iCloud Drive (not applicable in your case since you didn't optimize). In that case, they will have to be downloaded. All of that is done by the OS.

*hard links

I'm quite happy for the Documents and Desktop folders to appear under iCloud Drive, they've been there for some time now and I'm not concerned about them not appearing in the Home Folder. My problem is that these folders are both empty although all the contents are showing in iCloud.com. Before this happened these folders correctly showed their contents on my Mac.

I'm going to try Eric Root's suggestion that my problem may be due to a corrupt .plist file.

I wasn't sure what you meant by "quit the application" as it was just Finder I was looking at but after checking I had a backup - just relied on one - I moved the Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist to my Download folder. I didn't want to use my Desktop folder as it would then disappear up to iCloud as the rest of that folder had. I restarted my Mac and opened Finder again but there was still nothing in either my Desktop or my Documents folders so I've returned the Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist file to where it was.

You mention that I should now try resetting iCloud Drive/Options - did you mean that I should uncheck the box in Options against Desktop & Document Folders? I just wanted to check this as I want to be quite sure anything I do doesn't remove the contents of these folders from iCloud.

Check System Preferences to make sure things are as you want them.

The problem is that System Preferences are showing what the situation should be, i.e. the Desktop and Documents folders are synced to iCloud and Mac storage is not optimized. In that situation all the files in both these folders should appear on my Mac in the Desktop and Documents folders of iCloud Drive. If I click on iCloud Drive in the sidebar I do see folders for both Desktop and Documents but they're completely empty!

What I'm going to do in System Preferences/iCloud/iCloud Drive/Options is to uncheck the syncing of these two Desktop and Documents folders. According to the info about iCloud Drive this should clear out these folders on my Mac, which are already empty, leaving all the files in iCloud.com. I'll then go to iCloud.com and manually download all these files back to my Mac. Having done that I'll go back and check the syncing of these folders. I'll hope that this will sort out my problem, and leave all the files on my Mac!

Well yesterday I reset my iCloud Drive options so that Desktop & Documents were not syncing with the Drive and started to download all the Desktop files that were stored in iCloud.com. I found that I could only select for download just the files there, and not the folders, and that these files were all downloaded individually into the default Safari download folder. The wasn't too bad as I could change that default folder to be the Desktop. However the major problem was the folders I had on the Desktop. Each folder had to be opened in turn and the files then selected for download, and I had to keep changing the default download folder so that the files were downloaded into the correct subfolders. I agree that I have too much on my Desktop!

The above wasn't too bad but I hate to think how much work there would be in downloading all the Document files from iCloud.com where there are subfolders going down many levels. It's quite ridiculous that when anyone wants to stop syncing the Desktop & Documents to the iCloud Drive that Apple don't provide for some easy means of downloading the whole of the files to the Mac from where they were uploaded in the first instance. Others have commented on this.

To deal with restoring Documents to my Mac I'm going to have to resort to restoring these from my last Time Machine backup before this problem happened - fortunately since then I've not altered any of the Document files. Having read the excellent article by David Gewurtz about using Dropbox to sync Mac files I'm considering following this route in future to sync at least my Desktop and Documents so they are available in both my Mac and MacBook.

RobbieSnr wrote:

 

Well yesterday I reset my iCloud Drive options so that Desktop & Documents were not syncing with the Drive and started to download all the Desktop files that were stored in iCloud.com. I found that I could only select for download just the files there, and not the folders, and that these files were all downloaded individually into the default Safari download folder. The wasn't too bad as I could change that default folder to be the Desktop. However the major problem was the folders I had on the Desktop. Each folder had to be opened in turn and the files then selected for download, and I had to keep changing the default download folder so that the files were downloaded into the correct subfolders. I agree that I have too much on my Desktop!

 

The above wasn't too bad but I hate to think how much work there would be in downloading all the Document files from iCloud.com where there are subfolders going down many levels. It's quite ridiculous that when anyone wants to stop syncing the Desktop & Documents to the iCloud Drive that Apple don't provide for some easy means of downloading the whole of the files to the Mac from where they were uploaded in the first instance. Others have commented on this.

To deal with restoring Documents to my Mac I'm going to have to resort to restoring these from my last Time Machine backup before this problem happened - fortunately since then I've not altered any of the Document files.

 

I have since found that an option appears at one point when removing the syncing of Desktop & Documents to keep copies in the Mac of all the files that were in iCloud.com. These copies appear in a folder named iCloud Drive (Archive) in the home folder. These are actual copies of the files and not hard links, and can be moved over into Desktop and Document folders in the home directory. It is not therefore necessary to download these files directly from iCloud.com as i suggested above or retrieve them from a Time Machine backup. There is a mention in one of the iCloud Drive notes that says copies are kept on the Mac but it doesn't state where these are held.

Having read the excellent article by David Gewurtz about using Dropbox to sync Mac files I'm considering following this route in future to sync at least my Desktop and Documents so they are available in both my Mac and MacBook.
 

I want to have hard copies of my files on my hard disk rather than links so these are stored in my Time Machine backups, to allow a file to be retrieved at a later date should it have been deleted from the synced source. I've not been able to work out whether this would be possible if i used the Dropbox route. For the meantime therefore I'm carrying on using iCloud Drive to sync my files.

This is the most honest explanation of the problem that I've read.  Apple owes it to its users to be more straightforward in explaining the implications of their iCloud choice and, if a wrong choice is made, how to simply reverse it.  Up to know, I've been thrilled with my Mac -- Now I'm wondering, "Why the lack of up-front candor?"  There is a clear programming bias here on the part of Apple:  Why else, make it very easy to choose the cloud?  But very, very difficult to get out of it?  If so, that's not right.  Is this about "optimizing" my drive space?  Or "maximizing" my use of the cloud?  Bottom line, I want my own documents and desktop programs visible on my own computer and no need to use the cloud other than when I want to, not as a default.  There needs to be a simple way to reverse this and Robbie's right, Apple should provide it.

same thing happening here. All the files in my desktop suddenly disappeared after the operating system was updated. So bad, could not find some of my important documentaries. Shame on apple, I will never ever buy it again and I will share the awful experience to my friends

asimo...... wrote:

 

same thing happening here. All the files in my desktop suddenly disappeared after the operating system was updated. So bad, could not find some of my important documentaries. Shame on apple, I will never ever buy it again and I will share the awful experience to my friends

All you have to do is read. I didn't have any problem reading or understanding the implications when it asked me if I wanted to move my files to iCloud Drive.

good for you. obviously it is just reading problem that bring us here.

最後更新：2017-09-03 23:30:55

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