iCloud files GONE from desktop after updating to Mac OS Sonoma

oliwhiting wrote:

hi Luis, following up on this.

When pressing command-shift-period, the missing files appear but are greyed out. Do you know if there is any way to make them permanently reappear?

I also noticed the cloud icon next to some of the folders and redownloaded one before posting in this thread but unfortuneatly this did not cause any files within the folders to return.

Yes, you can make them permanently reappear.

Open Terminal, and type:

"chflags -R nohidden "

WITHOUT the quotes; leave a trailing space as shown above; do NOT press enter yet;

Drag and drop the folder(s) with the hidden files onto the Terminal window;

Press Enter.

Hi Barney, thank you for your response.

Yes, further investigation has shown that the missing files are visible on iCloud.com, despite this they still cannot be located in the iCloud Drive on my Mac in the Finder application. Do you know if there is any way for me to use iCloud.com to restore the files back to my desktop?

On the empty folders with the down-arrow cloud, click the down-arrow cloud to download the folder to download the items. It should not appear the way it does, but maybe that will correct it.

There is known issues with Chrome causing downloaded items in the Downloads folder to be hidden. I doubt it is related to your problem.

You can download the folders from iCloud.com, but there is something else wrong because there should at least be a dummy file showing what is stored in the cloud and not downloaded.

It doesn't look like it, but are you running any other cloud file storage like OneDrive or Dropbox. There seems to be a lot of issues with those, but I don't know how they would cause issues with iCloud Drive.

The Relocated Items folder is pretty standard since around Catalina, maybe earlier. The only things it would contain that you care about is files you had stored at the top-level of the startup drive. That would not be possible if you upgraded from anything after Catalina.

The other things in that folder could be custom Apache Web Server configurations or other system server configurations. If you never changed any of those, there is nothing in that folder that would be of value to you. It is definitely not where your files went. That folder is an alias to the actual folder that is in /Users/Shared. When you go look, you may have several "Previously Relocated Items" folders.

Several of these folders show a cloud icon next to their names. It looks like their contents are not being automatically downloaded as they should.

It is possible, as Barney indicated, that files are there but hidden. What happens if you press Command-Shift-period when inside one of these folders?

Since the update, iCloud has gone from my MacBook and I can’t open Safari to reload ICloud. The photos on my iPhone has synced and show as blank photos on my MacBook with an ICloud symbol by then. Also, it says I have an Apple update, but when I click it nothing happens.

I have just found that if the time and date is incorrect then this causes the problem. Somehow since the update, the time and date had changed. I just corrected this and everything came back to normal after hours of frustration.

Are they available in iCloud.com?

Are you logged into the same user account you had before?

Are you logged into iCloud with the same AppleID you used before?

Just to make sure... do you or do you not have folders called "Desktop" and "Documents" in your iCloud Drive?

If you do, then the files you are looking for should be there.

Thank you, this is very good to know. I had no idea that these two problems were related.