Why is Desktop not Showing Hard Drives?

Question

Why is Desktop not Showing Hard Drives?

As far as I know, I changed nothing—I updated nothing. Yesterday, my partitioned internal hard drives and my one external hard drive showed up on my desktop.

Today, there's a folder called "Desktop" in which all of my internal hard drives reside. The one external HD still is showing up on the desktop.

I've gone into Settings and found nothing that would indicate that these internal hard drives should be in a folder on my desktop!

I also keep a number of often-used files on my desktop and all of those are now in that same "desktop" folder ... on the desktop!

What gives?

Macbook Pro running Ventura 13.7.1

MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 13.7

Posted on Feb 26, 2025 2:41 PM

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Answer 1

Feb 27, 2025 3:06 AM in response to KatieOConnell

Showing hard drives on the desktop is governed by Finder settings:

Go to Finder->Settings, click on General:

I can't see how a folder named "Desktop" would be created without user intervention.

To be clear, "Desktop" is actually a folder, residing inside your home folder.

It may help clarify things if you can post a screenshot.

Press Command-Shift-D. This should open a window showing your actual Desktop.

Do you see a folder called "Desktop" in there? If you do, then you really have a "Desktop" folder inside your Desktop folder.

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Answer 2

Feb 27, 2025 1:18 PM in response to Luis Sequeira1

That you for your screenshot. I actually have my Finder settings to show external drives—which makes it all the more confusing.

BUT since I posted my query, I have discovered that the "Desktop" folder mentioned in which my hard drives appear actually point to ICloud. As if they are an alias to iCloud?

I still don't know how or what happened, but I've now dragged each of my hard drives OUT of the "downloads" folders (that was on icloud). So, I think I'm back in business.

I should like to understand it better so that it doesn't happen again.

Any thoughts are appreciated.

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Answer 3

Feb 27, 2025 1:42 PM in response to KatieOConnell

Unfortunately Apple makes it too easy to activate “Documents and Desktop in iCloud” as you have, without users realizing what they are doing.

It may be useful but also a problem if you have more content than fits in the allowed space in iCloud. But the big problem is people not even knowing it’s happening.

If you want to revert to the situation where Desktop and Documents folders are stored only locally, go to System Settings, select your Apple account (near the top left), then click on iCloud Drive and deactivate Documents and Desktop in iCloud (the wording is not exactly that but should be obvious; I am not at my mac at the moment to be completely precise).

You will be asked if you want to keep local copies. OF COURSE You do! You don’t want to lose your precious files.

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Answer 4

Feb 27, 2025 2:24 PM in response to KatieOConnell

THANK you for your informed and considered response!

Life was much simpler when software companies didn't consider their users to be idiots who need to be led around by the nose and have updates and changes automagically put in place without the user's knowledge.

Now i sound like an old frump .... but there it is!

Thanks again!

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Why is Desktop not Showing Hard Drives?