IPad favorites in Files App Disappear and Reappear

I have a long list of favorites in the Files app. Very frequently (sometimes multiple times a day), my favorites will all disappear. It is not that the favorites are hidden. Usually, they will all disappear; lately, I have had about three that seem to remain after all the others disappear. Eventually, if I leave the files app open or the Pages app open with recent files shown, the iPad will rebuild this list adding several at a time. Sometimes, this happens very quickly; sometimes, it can take much longer.

This has happened sporadically over the course of years. I have tried restarting and force restarting. I have tried erasing all settings. I have also tried erasing the entire iPad and building it back from scratch — adding and setting up each app individually (without using backup or transfer). The problem reappears.

I do have a suspicion it might be a memory leak problem. I had all my favorites disappear in Finder on my Mac sporadically some years ago and noticed that an app was filling the hard drive with data and constricting the memory swap. I wonder if the Mac and iPad are using a shared code base that is causing the problem.

The iPads that show the problem in recent time are an iPad Pro 12.9/M1/2TB/16GB/Cellular and an iPad Pro 12.9/M1/512GB/8GB/Wi-Fi. They should generally have plenty of memory. I don’t often use apps that should consume a lot of memory.

Another possible clue is that in a couple cases the loss of my favorites has coincided with Stage Manager stopping sending a signal to my external display before restarting the display. This may or may not be related.

The disappearing and reappearing of favorites happens with and without external display, and has happened even before stage manager was a feature.

Any solutions? It’s really I slowing my workflow to have to go through my entire directory tree each time I need to interact with a file. I see as well that others have reported this problem in the forums over the last several years. (I don’t see a thread that is still open for reply.)

iPad Pro, 12.9-inch, 6th Gen, Cell 5G

Posted on Feb 5, 2023 10:35 AM

Best reply

John3462

Level 1

11 points

Posted on Mar 29, 2023 6:34 AM

iCloud Drive favorites have been disappearing frequently from the sidebar in the Files app on iPad and iPhone. After a while, they reappear, then they disappear again. When this happens, tag items are also not shown (wheres the tags themselves are shown in the sidebar).

For me, this is a major issue since iPadOS does not have symlinks that I could use to quickly access folders and files. Without favorites and tags, I have to navigate through the whole hierarchy for every file that I need. This is quite cumbersome.

It seems that I am not the only person who is affected by this. People have reported related issues since February 2018. Apple has not fixed it in five years:

The following list shows things I tried. So far, nothing helped permanently.

I have sent multiple bug reports to Apple.
I tried to unfavorite folders and re-favorite them, but I cannot even unfavorite folders on my iPad when this happens. — No fix.
I waited: sometimes the favorites re-appeared after some time. — Only temporary fix.
I updated iPadOS and iOS. The problem still exists after updating to iPadOS 16.3. — No fix.
I dragged the favorite folders to the sidebar. — Only temporary fix.
I added tags to the favorite folders. That made them re-appear in the sidebar — Only temporary fix.
I moved the favorite folders into a new folder. — Only temporary fix.
I deleted all my iCloud Drive data, stopped syncing iCloud Drive on all my devices, the started syncing again and copied the data back into iCloud Drive. — Only temporary fix.
I removed third-party apps from my devices that integrated with the Files app: Cryptomator 2 and OneDrive. — Did not fix it.
I deactivated MATLAB under locations in the sidebar — Did not fix it.
I temporarily signed out of iCloud on iPhone, iPad and my MacBook — Did not fix it.
Uninstalled VPN profile and app and did a reset of network settings — Did not fix it.
I contacted Apple support and sent them iCloud Drive log files. My account is now in escalation mode.

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IPad favorites in Files App Disappear and Reappear

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