Can't delete 76 empty folders in my icloud trash

Question

Level 1

95 points

Can't delete 76 empty folders in my icloud trash

In my iCloud trash can, I have 76 empty folders that I can't delete. When I empty the trash can, all folders are back in a few seconds, and the 29-day counters start from the beginning. I also tried to delete them via the iCloud web app. I tried to recover them and delete them again. Also deleting them in my iPad or iPhone doesn't help. When I delete the folders, they also contain some files and sub-folders; these are deleted and gone.

These folders were created in my Obsidian Vault shared in iCloud when I was testing a script. Not sure if I delete these folders in Obsidian, in the Finder view, or on the command line. Nevertheless, all files I delete since this debugging session are not in the trash anymore.

These folders have all "0 Bytes", so it seems only a cosmetic issue ;-)

Any idea?

MacBook Pro 14″, macOS 15.4

Posted on Apr 12, 2025 12:59 AM

Reply

Answer 1

Top-ranking reply

jp_leif Author

Level 1

95 points

Apr 25, 2025 3:23 AM in response to jp_leif

After a few months of trying various things, I discovered that on the iPad and iPhone, most of these folders contain another folder, which has a status icon of a cloud with an exclamation mark. Because I tried a lot of things to solve the issue, I have no clue if the folder existed from the beginning.

Nevertheless, after recovering these folders, I marked them as always available locally on my iPad. I then deleted them again, and subsequently removed the folder inside the non-deletable folder, which then allowed me to successfully delete the original folder.

There were a few folders left with no content, so I recovered these as well, marked them as always available locally, and then created a file inside each. After that, I deleted the folders again and followed the same procedure as before. After that, all the zombie folders were permanently removed from all my devices.

I still think the problem is that I work inside the Obsidian vault on iCloud while testing my Python script in the terminal and deleting the files and folder created by the script on the command line. So, be careful when using the Terminal inside the iCloud folder, especially in combination with Obsidian.

Reply

Answer 2

Apr 25, 2025 8:58 AM in response to jp_leif

It looks like you found a good solution, one that I will keep in mind!

It seems to me that folders behave more oddly than individual files, although folders in the more recent version are looking more versatile than previously. I agree that I want to test what happens, especially with folders, before doing batch operations outside of the normal Mac operations.

Reply

Can't delete 76 empty folders in my icloud trash

Similar questions