I wanted to have constant backup of my iCloud Drive on my iMac. I clicked on iCloud Drive in the Finder and holding down the option key dragged it to my Macintosh HD. I cannot find it under iCloud or Macintosh HD. Where would it have gone?

Hi Richorrob,

Thank you for posting in Apple Support Communities. From our understanding, you would like to keep a backup of your documents from iCloud Drive and would like to customize the sidebar in Finder to include iCloud Drive, do we have that right?

For the Find toolbar, you can check out this resource: Customize the Finder toolbars on Mac.

In reference to the back up. You may want to look into creating a Time Machine back up. Check out Back up your Mac with Time Machine.

Hope that helps!

I clicked on iCloud Drive in the Finder and holding down the option key, dragged it to my Macintosh HD.

It's already on your Mac in a hidden location. I'll guess macOS is preventing you from duplicating the content.

What may have happened, is the following: If you drag the iCloud Drive icon from the sidebar to a folder, you are removing it from the sidebar instead of creating a copy. Karina's advice helped you to get the icon back into the sidebar.

You may still want to create a safety copy of your iCloud Drive items, independent of Time Machine. The Time Machine backup is great to have, but may be incomplete, if not all items on iCloud Drive have been downloaded from iCloud, because Time Machine cannot save optimised items. Are you seeing any items on iCloud Drive with a a cloud and a download arrow behind the name? These items will be missing in Time Machine.

To create copies of your iCloud Drive items try again to hold down the options key while you drag items from iCloud Drive to a folder - but do not drag the icon of the drive, but open iCloud Drive and drag each of the subfolders separately to the folder, where you want to save them.