iCloud refuses to permanently delete files

Question

Problem

There are ~25 files and directories in my Recently Deleted folder.

When I select them and click Delete Selected now one of three things happens:

The files go grey for a while then reappear with no message
The files disappear but when I return 10 minutes or so later they are back in the Recently Deleted folder
The files disappear but after a while I get a message saying the file "could not be deleted" and it is restored

I think this must be a server-side issue.

Background context

I am trying to delete these because my iCloud Drive was having sync issues and bird / fileproviderd / cloudd were hogging the CPU for days.
I could see the sync was stuck on some files in Trash.
I removed iCloud Drive from my macOS completely and backed it up on a hard drive.
I want to delete the Recently Deleted files before trying to up sync again.

Posted on Jul 23, 2026 2:23 AM

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Answer 1

Level 8

41,749 points

Re: "iCloud refuses to permanently delete files"

Note: Removing files from iCloud also removes those files from everywhere they are in sync.

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