Sigh. A family member started working with a new client today and they are using Freeform Boards to collaborate.
We have never used Freeform or collaboration, so now we’ll learn how. As it wasn’t working, a helpful-minded ITer from the client appears to have turned on Store Desktop and Documents in iCloud.
(which is not the right solution but that’s another story. It appears from initial research that one has to turn on Freeform in the iCloud > Saved to iCloud settings, and have enough storage capacity (family member has 50GB), is all (oh and their might be other problems with collaborating/security/mixed OSes etc but: another Topic…)).
It was also noted that many Desktop icons of folders used daily for work with other clients now had some tiny icon next to them, and that a finder window showed hundreds of GB uploading to iCloud.
So… it appears as though all the content of Desktop and Documents are unintendedly being uploaded to iCloud. Fearing data loss/corruption I suggested increasing the iCloud+ amount of storage to avoid corruption/loss but first the family member tried to turn off D&D but it clicked itself back on. I thought of turning off wifi to avoid overloading hotel wifi but in the end we decided to reduce risk and just let it all upload, then recover. (It was slow but the increased storage purchase seems to have gone ok).
I found two TBT posts , one in 2022, one in 2025 that seem to indicate a couple of ways to safely return to the desired condition of having the Desktop and Documents only on the Mac.
The essence seems to be that the files have indeed been copied to iCloud (not removed locally), and the original Desktop and Documents moved to a local subdirectory.
I’m wondering if anyone else has experienced this since the 2025 Topic and if the recovery to the previous state (on Tahoe 26.3) would go like (backup not available):
turn off internet connection
find and move the subfolder contents to, say, the Downloads folder to preserve them
turn on internet, iCloud will see nothing to sync and delete its contents
turn off Desktop and Documents in iCloud Settings
move the Desktop and Documents from their step 2 location to original location
hope all went well and breathe freely again with a shot of Ogden’s old fire whisky
A complicating factor is the family member is traveling far away and we tried both Screen Sharing app and Share Screen in Messages and neither would work. We hope to be in the same physical location again in about 2 months so worst case we leave as is, learn how to get work done with years worth of folder organization displaced, pay for the storage and try to tackle it when back together.
I don’t use iCloud storage for my Desktop and Documents, but here’s an Apple support article that may help:
Based on what I know:
Your files have been copied to iCloud
Local files shouldn’t be automatically deleted unless you are running out of local storage and Settings → General → Storage → Optimize Storage is enabled.
You might not be able to turn this off while iCloud is syncing, so you may have to let it finish first.
When you turn off Desktop and Documents storage, the system should create new Desktop and Documents folders in your home directory. You may have to manually move your files from the iCloud Drive location to these folders afterward.
But I haven’t actually done this, so you might want to wait for an answer from someone who has.
Thanks @Shamino , this and other Apple pages and Discussions pages tell slightly different stories, and the one you include above doesn’t indicate if this is OS specific (we’re on Tahoe).
So it looks like you’re correct, the family member spent a whole day with client and back at hotel the files are still uploading, so apparently you cannot cancel it and it will continue if interrupted.
Also appears they want you to download all your files again if you turn this off. This kind of mess is why I don’t use iCloud for anything but email.
When I get this solved, hopefully by finding local copies on the Mac and dragging them into new Desktop and Documents folders (could also take a very long time to download over 300GB), I’ll post back here how it worked. Fingers crossed we don’t lose data and get restored to previous set up with minimal hair loss and cursing.
That could take as long as 9 or 10 weeks so in the meantime if anyone has done this would gladly read the input.
If all the files are stored locally (the iCloud Disk cache folders), then you should be able to drag/drop them back to your (new) Desktop and Documents folders.
You shouldn’t have to re-download them unless the local copy was ejected (e.g., deleted to free up space). But either way, you should see them all in the iCloud Disk folder, with the ejected files showing an icon indicating that they only exist in the cloud. When you drag them back, the local files will move, and the remote-only files will be downloaded.
Howard Oakley has written more helpfully than the Apple documentation about this confusing and somewhat counterintuitive process. Scroll down to “Remove Desktop & Documents from iCloud”.
These two points from his summary describe it well:
Turning this setting on and off aren’t complementary procedures, in that files aren’t returned to their original location, and users may assume that they have been deleted and lost.
Although technically correct and ingeniously engineered, this remains disastrous in terms of its human interface.
Exactly, @mikebhm ! thanks for the link and comments.
I didn’t see in Oakley’s post where the original contents are moved locally, or misunderstood. Does he mean they are in the iCloud Drive folder? so one would simply open a couple of Finder windows after turning off D&DFiiD and drag-move the contents to newly created Desktop and Documents folders?
Oakley has a talent for drily dropping in some powerful comments:
Although technically correct and ingeniously engineered, this remains disastrous in terms of its human interface.
-> (insert Emoji if it exists for the comedy show drum thing for the punch line)…
Apple employs a lot of smoke and mirrors to make it appear like there is an iCloud Drive folder, but as I understand it is a collection of links to other places, but sometimes trying to see where things actually are is masked by the tricks.
I seem to remember Oakley advising against putting Desktop & Docs in iCloud, but I have always loved it and it is the first setting I change when setting up. Going that way is very easy. Although I have turned it off once in the past I really can’t recall the exact steps but it was initially alarming to see the empty new ~/Desktop and ~/Documents. As the Oakley article said I think it was just a matter of dragging from the iCloud Drive “Folder” in the sidebar to the new Desktop and Document folders in User. I dont think it was necessary to dig down to the actual location of D&D.
The iCloud Drive link in the Finder goes to an actual folder. On my macOS 26 system, this is ~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs. All the files appear to be there, and accessing something that’s not present locally causes it to be downloaded from iCloud. I didn’t see an obvious way to tell, from a Terminal session, if a file is present locally or if it’s just a placeholder for a cloud-stored file (that is, an equivalent to the cloud icon that the Finder displays). But I didn’t spend a lot of time looking for it either.
Correct. Unless you need access from a Terminal session or a non-Mac Unix app, there is no need to know or care where those files are stored. The Finder and the standard system file dialogs will present whatever you need to access iCloud Drive files.
So, after turning off Desktop & Documents, just use the Finder to go to the Desktop and Documents folders in the iCloud Drive and drag/drop the contents to ~/Desktop and ~/Documents, respectively. Whatever is already stored locally will just be moved. Whatever needs to be downloaded will be downloaded and then the result will be moved.
Yes I appreciate that this is where they actually exist, but my attempts in macOS27 at navigating to that take me straight back to the Finder sidebar. Tried Go to Folder and directly with ~/Library made visible.
However I can navigate to Mobile Documents on a CCC backup of the main internal, but not on the booted volume.
These are what I meant by Apple smoke and mirrors.
PS I always have all my iCloud Drive documents ‘not optimised’ so local full size copies exist, but don’t believe this affects these visibility issues.
I remember how many of us reacted in the old days when Microsoft started to hide the real location of important directories (Desktop, Documents, etc.) in Windows Explorer. Now Apple does exactly the same thing. To be fair, I now see the utility of what Microsoft did, even if I still think it is somehow wrong.
Same here. The Finder hides the Mobile Documents folder, because its content is presented through other ways. I found it by opening iCloud Drive and dragging a folder to a Terminal window. But even if you could access that folder directly from the Finder, I wouldn’t recommend it. macOS is handling those folders with special background software. Trying to bypass that software will either not work (as I found when opening a cloud-hosted document from a Terminal session) or could end up corrupting the file (if you actually did manage to bypass the software). Not worth trying unless you’re running experiments to figure out the underlying system design.