How to fix greyed out files post updating to Sonoma

You turned on synching with iCloud Drive. You should see them in the Sidebar under iCloud Drive.

If you do t want that, turn it off.

Add your Desktop and Documents files to iCloud Drive – Apple Support (UK)

Turn off desktop and documents option in iCloud setting keep a copy of folder. this worked for me!

The following command in Terminal is supposed to unhide all regular files contained inside your Documents folder

chflags -R nohidden ~/Documents

It looks like these files became hidden, for some reason.

You can unhide them with a short command in Terminal.

Where are those files located? Are there many of them?

This may be used to determine the best course of action.

You can in principle unhide "everything" with a certain folder hierarchy with a single command, but there may be files that should remain hidden.

If you're using Chrome, and you're in an Incognito window, your downloaded files will be hidden.

I just spent over an hour on the phone with Apple support on this issue, but they had no clue as this does NOT happen on Safari incognito - only Chrome Incognito.

Easy to think it has something to do with Sonoma - or even Dropbox or iCloud - because it seems like it's an issue with Finder. But nope... just Incognito being super incognito! Re-save or re-export from a normal window (not incognito).

I genuinely hope this post saves someone else from pulling their hair out trying to figure out where their downloaded files have gone! 🙂

p.s. There's a handy shortcut you can use: SHIFT + COMMAND + PERIOD which will reveal hidden files.

Exactly the same problem, pretty sure it's an iCloud issue (for me, anyway). I've been synching to iCloud for a long time and it seems that any files that were NOT "off loaded" before the update are normal, and files that WERE "off loaded" before the update are now grey. Even if I download the grey files, they remain grey. But the drag to desktop and then cmd Z back into the folder fixes it. MEGA ANNOYING!

Also not interested in doing this folder-by-folder, file-by-file.

Dear Apple: what's the solution please?

thank you

ofc17 wrote:

All of these files are missing (except the ones I recreated today). They show up in a search but are nowhere to be found.

https://discussions.apple.com/content/attachment/2041ae67-cbe2-4b66-83f7-67444dee62d2

Select one of these in the search results and press Command-R. What happens?

Tonelaw wrote:

Why did i update? Now having the exact same issue. 40% of files missing from I all my ableton live 11 projects! This happened a few years back and i never got the files back! I hope to god there is away to reverse this update without losing files. I’ve over 3years of unreleased music literally thousands of hours spent! Never mind the hours I’ll need to spend to figure this out! Nice one Apple

If you have proper backups, then you should be able to restore from the backups. If your backups were not successful, then you need to rethink your backup strategy. Apple does include Time Machine software to make backups easy, but there are other third party options as well.

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

Also, it is best to test out upgrades before making them on the main system. You can install macOS to an external drive and migrate everything from your main drive or from a backup. These days it is also possible to install macOS to another APFS volume on the same internal boot drive (just give the APFS volume a unique name) if you have enough free space on the drive.

raggabass wrote:

No, they are gone. I back up on iCloud and the are not even on my iCloud drive.

iCloud is not a backup except on iOS for the iPhone. iCloud on macOS is only a file syncing service where any change made on macOS is reflected on that file on all your other devices. A backup will keep older iterations of your files so if you make a catastrophic edit or deletion, then you can use the backup to retrieve a copy of the file made before the mistake was made.

Apple includes Time Machine with macOS for making backups easy for users on macOS:

Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support

Command-R should open the item in its folder location.

What happens in the same situation if you press Command-I (it should open the Info window, which, amongst other information, shows the location of the file)?

I had the same issue, but I couldn't find them . . . and then . . . I think I found them.

Macintosh HD > Users > MyName > iCloud Drive (Archive) > Desktop

It appears that they are all under the iCloud drive:

~/Library/Mobile Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs

That Apple would make that sort of BS change, without telling people, is beyond me.

I expect that sort of poor customer experience from ... nope ... no one does that to a user base anymore.

Omg.. i have the same problem. After the new update, I turned iCloud sync without thinking about it. They moved all of my files to the cloud. I turned the sync option off, moved my documents & downloads from the iCloud Drive (Archive) back to their original location, but now they're not all there. There are files missing in folders, maybe because the iCloud wasn't fully synced? This is a big issue :( I'm a music producers and many of my sounds are just gone... Does anyone know what to do?

I updated to Sonoma 14.1.1 last night and all my desktop folders and files are now deleted. They are so deleted on my iCloud drive so I can't retrieve them and even my time machine doesn't work. What a horrible update!