Mac is moving my drives icons on the desktop when I put it to sleep

This latest annoyance started for me immediately after "upgrading" to Sonoma. It happens when I choose "Clean Up" from the view menu. In past systems the icons were nicely lined up close to where I dropped them. With Sonoma somebody screwed that up.

Did you try the fix I posted that worked for me? No icons on your desktop can be even a little right of your hard drive icon. Moving my HD icon to the right edge of my screen fixed the problem. Good luck.

I too was getting annoyed that the drive icons on my desktop kept changing positions my Mac Studio. Here is a simple solution that works regardless of the order that the external drives mount. First, I positioned the external drive icons where I want them. By default, my boot SSD drive show ups in the upper right-hand corner of my desktop. I clicked on "View" in the menu bar and selected "Sort By" and then "Snap to Grid" and then adjusted the desired spacing. In my case, I have an external RAID array and four external drives (three hard drives and an external SSD). I started by creating numbered tags for the external drives (right-click on each desktop icon and select, "Tags..."). I numbered the RAID array with the tag, "1". Then I numbered the tag for one of my Time Machine backup hard drives as, "2". My other Time Machine backup drive's tag is, "3". A Carbon Copy Cloner hard drive's tag is, "4". Finally, an external SSD's tag is, "5". From "View" in the menu bar I then selected "Sort By" and then "Tags". Any other desktop file or folder icons appear to show up in alphabetical order. Of course, if there are any other icons that you want to have stay in place, you can tag them with other numbers. Regardless of the order that your external drives mount, they will always end up being displayed in your desired order!

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The problem seems most sensitive to icon text size. In "Show View Options" on the Desktop, I find that, with snap-to-grid turned on, if I set the text size to 13 or smaller then the HD icons will stay where I put them. Otherwise, even if other icons are nowhere near, the HD icons will move. Adjusting icon size and grid spacing make almost no difference.

Apparently Apple recently changed the rules for the physical separation of HD icons from other icons to be excessively over-sensitive to the width of icon labels. As I recall, disk icons have always moved automatically if they were too close to others. But now that threshold has gone nuts, especially for the HD icons.

Workaround Found!

Since this bug persists, I've now implemented a workaround using the app Keyboard Maestro (https://www.keyboardmaestro.com/main) which places my icons back where they belong with the press of a keyboard shortcut. (It's also possible to have the task performed at startup or to trigger it in various situations on your Mac, such as when waking up from sleep or when a drive is attached, etc.)

The solution is a bit geeky (but not difficult) and requires a license for Keyboard Maestro, which I already owned and which I already use extensively to automate numerous things on my Macs. So, for me, it was just a matter of customizing the recommended macro to move my particular icons to the particular locations where they need to go. (Those variables will of course be different for each person.)

This solution took less than 5 minutes to set up and has worked 100% reliably for me for the last few months. If you're interested, the solution is described by user @August in this post:

https://forum.keyboardmaestro.com/t/arranging-icons-in-finder-icon-view/33258/50?u=soundsgood

Near the end of the thread I thank him for pointing me in the right direction. My user name on that forum is @soundsgood.

Apple, I'll state this again: You really need to fix this bug.

This is happening to me as well. It never happened with any of my previous Macs, but this recent one is a Mac Studio and it came with Ventura. After it wakes up, my drive icons move toward the bottom right. I do use a 4k monitor, so not sure if that has anything to do with this because I used the same 4k monitor on an older Mac when I was running Catalina and it didn't happen then. I think I read a fix somewhere about turning on hidden files, then deleting the .DS_Store from the Desktop or something like that. The theory being that the file could have gotten corrupted somehow. I had tried that at the time and it seemed to have fixed my problem for a couple of months. Unfortunately I didn't save the instructions or a link to the post with that fix either, and the problem came back. Now when I try, I don't see .DS_Store on my desktop anywhere, so I am probably missing a step.

I am not an expert, but here is my suspicion. If in fact it has to do with that hidden .DS_Store file (which I assume keeps track of icon positions), then could the fact that my Desktop being set to sync in iCloud have something to do with this? I'll try turning off iCloud Desktop and Documents Folders backup to see if this resolves it. Thoughts?

Pretty sure TinkerTool can show invisibles if I recall. Worth a look (it's free) though I don't know about moving a DS file - keeping it out of the way... MacOS might want to keep replacing it to a default location. But then that's what the internal drive is supposed to do as well. :-/

I'm using a Mac Studio M1 Max. The problem with wandering drive icons began when I upgraded from Monterey to Sonoma (14.3.1). There were no changes in prefs, additional apps, etc. Note that only the drive icons move, not my folder icons.

I posted what cured this for me quite a while ago, though I cannot take credit for this solution, it has 100% cured it for me. Apparently, as a Mac boots up or wakes from sleep, the icons are at the default setting, which is possibly larger than you have them set, so to the os as it boots, they are too close together and so it moves them. Then it realises that you want smaller icons & resizes them, but now it is too late, they have moved. So what worked for me, and Joel who posted the solution, was to move the icons slightly left (presuming they are on the right side of the desktop) and further/farther apart vertically, giving a larger gap. so as the os wakes up, there is space for them in their native larger size, thus it doesn't need to move them, and they stay where they are. I have actually just tried squashing them up a bit and setting sleep then waking, and yes they moved again, but with the increased gap all around them, for the last few/several months, they have stayed where they are. Hope this helps...

I posted what cured this for me quite a while ago, though I cannot take credit for this solution, it has 100% cured it for me. Apparently, as a Mac boots up or wakes from sleep, the icons are at the default setting, which is possibly larger than you have them set, so to the os as it boots, they are too close together and so it moves them. Then it realises that you want smaller icons & resizes them, but now it is too late, they have moved. So what worked for me, and Joel who posted the solution, was to move the icons slightly left (presuming they are on the right side of the desktop) and further/farther apart vertically, giving a larger gap. so as the os wakes up, there is space for them in their native larger size, thus it doesn't need to move them, and they stay where they are. I have actually just tried squashing them up a bit and setting sleep then waking, and yes they moved again, but with the increased gap all around them, for the last few/several months, they have stayed where they are. Hope this helps...

Running Sonoma on a Mac Studio, Studio Display, seven hard drives with the the same problem as others on this discussion. I have solved the issue at least for me. I placed all the hard drives in the upper right screen in a row, size 32 x 32, and grid spacing needle in the middle. I move the other 62 item on the desktop pds, pages documents, jpegs, folders, and InDesign documents, etc. to the left side of the screen and left them there. After multiple computer sleeping awakening even a restart over 3 days nothing has moved. 

I have since moved 9 folders in a row approximately 2 visual inches from the hard drives. The rest of the desktop items are spread out mainly on the left half of the screen a few on the right half. Hope you can make sense of my writing. Good luck.

I also have this issue. I always have my Macintosh Drive icon and my TM drive icon in the top right corner of the screen. Now with Sonoma each time I boot up YM icon moves to a lower position.

I have been suffering this annoying problem also. I only had speech start up automatically , deleted it and all seems ok once again - only tested it once thus far though

Both my Mac Studio and my 2019 27" iMac with Sonoma had this issue. I was able to use the "snap to grid" to keep all icons in place. Never had to do this before.