I noticed today that all my Desktop folders and files had disappeared. Investigating I found them in the Trash and that somehow icloud had moved them all to the cloud without me requesting it. Shortly afterwards it had copied everything from the old Desktop (which had mysteriously disappeared) to the cloud. Uncertain what triggerred this. I have subsequently found this article - Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive - Apple Support I clicked on sync the desktop with the icloud drive and now I find that my documents folder is also migrating to the cloud. Is this a desperate attempt to charge me for more storage and how do I get them back where they started?
With iCloud Documents and Desktop, it’s not an either/or - it’s both folders.
How to fix: make two new folders in your user folder one of which is called localdesk and the other one is called localdocs. Those two folders will not be recognized by the system as anything special so they won’t get touched.
Go to your iCloud Drive Desktop folder and Command + A to select everything and then Command + C to copy everything.
Navigate to your localdesk folder and Option + Command + V to move everything to this new folder.
Wait a while to make sure that everything is truly moved from iCloud Drive. Meaning when you look in iCloud Drive Desktop, there’s nothing there. You might want to look in iCloud.com to make sure everything‘s truly moved.
Go to your iCloud Drive Documents folder and Command + A to select everything and then Command + C to copy everything.
Navigate to your localdocs folder and Option + Command + V to move everything to this new folder.
Wait a while to make sure that everything is truly moved from iCloud Drive. Meaning when you look in iCloud Drive Documents, there’s nothing there. You might want to look in iCloud.com to make sure everything‘s truly moved.
Go into Apple ID - iCloud Drive - options and turn off “Documents and Desktop folders”. There will be an extremely scary dialogue box which will tell you that all your documents will be stored in iCloud Drive, but they will vanish from your file system, so to speak. But because of the previous steps, all your documents are already in your local file system, so that dialogue box will not truly mean anything to you.
It may or may not make an “iCloud Drive (archive)” folder in your documents folder. iCloud will desperately try to keep your Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive and it will be very difficult to delete them. You might just want to ignore them and use the folders you want to use.
Now, since you know how to select everything and copy / move everything, you can now move everything from these temporary local folders, and move them back into the real desktop and document folders in your user folder.
I’ve done this many times. Done properly[1], you won’t lose anything.
Work slowly and deliberately. Double check everything before you do anything. ↩︎
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Still boggles my mind that this is default-no-option, iCloud behavior.
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Thanks so much I will follow the steps and report back. Right now I am copying everything back from the cloud to my NAS as a safety step. Very odd that it did it without my intervention.
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