Documents MOVED to iCloud

This was done when you first logged into the new system and set up iCloud. One of the questions was whether or not you wanted to move you documents & data to iCloud. I chose not to as it was clear and I did not want my documents folder in iCloud.

As was said, turn it off and remove you info from iCloud if you don't want it there.

annettepeyton wrote:

I've spent long enough on this and I don't seem to be getting anywhere. I appreciate everyone's help, however, from all indications, my files were moved from my computer to icloud.

Here is what I have determined from my Mac:

None of your files were moved.

The Desktop and Documents folders now have a new extended attribute that tells Finder to not display them in the Home folder, and to display them under the iCloud Drive folder. The files in those folders are synced with iCloud storage, but they still exist exactly where they were.

You can see that the two folders still exist in the file system by running this command in Terminal:

ls -alO ~/

You will see these indications for Desktop and Documents:

drwxr-xr-x@ 7 Barney staff - 238 Sep 25 07:33 Desktop

drwxr-xr-x@ 11 Barney staff - 374 Sep 6 06:54 Documents

The first d indicates they are in fact actual directories, not links (which would be indicated by an l)

The - between staff and size indicates they are not hidden (otherwise it would say, "hidden").

You can look inside each folder using the same command and see all of the documents inside of them.

ls -alO ~/Documents

You can drag the Desktop or Documents folder from the iCloud Drive into Terminal and it will write out the path of the folder. You'll note that it is the path to the folders in your Home folder, not some place in Mobile Documents.

I suppose it is possible that I have a very special installation of Sierra, but I doubt that.

As an addendum to my previous post, it may be that a small number of "hot" files are maintained on the local drive, so if you have a lot of files (I only had a sparse amount), they may not all reside on your Mac locally.

The descriptions of iCloud Drive's Desktop and Documents that I have read does not seem to indicate the feature is designed to save disk space, so I'm not sure if this supposition is true.

That tidbit may be in Bill's article linked above (haven't had time to read through it, yet).

Annette, thank you for posting. I had the same expectations and wouldn't have expected that my documents would be moved away. I thought it would sync the Documents folder across devices.

Luckily I didn't turn it on. The option "optimise storage" was checked by default when I looked in to the system preferences of "Documents & Desktop".

Your documents were not MOVED, but only made invisible on the original Mac, and they were downloaded to any other Mac with the same iCloud id if you turned on syncing on the other Mac. To keep all of your documents on one of your Macs, turn OFF Optimized Storage on that Mac (assuming there is enough room for all of them on that Mac). On any Mac where Optimized Storage is turned ON, some of the documents may be removed from that Mac when storage runs low, and very large files may be kept only on iCloud with respect to that Mac.

Download my article explaining this in detail, as a PDF file, at: http://www.quecheesoftware.com/iCloud.html

If you know the name of any of the files that are missing do the following:

Download and run Find Any File and run the search "File name contains xxxxxxxxxxxxxx".

FAF can search areas that Spotlight can't like invisible folders, system folders and packages. If those files are hiding somewhere on your hard drive FAF will find it.

annettepeyton wrote:

I'm still not sure why apple has to make this so difficult. Don't mess with my files, I'll manage them.

You told them to mess with them when you enabled Desktop and Documents during the setup assistant.

I didn't find anything difficult about it. It said it was going to move my Desktop and Documents folder into iCloud and that's what it did.

When I disabled it, it told me what was going to happen and how to move my files back onto my hard drive. All pretty simple.

If not, I would like to express my disappointment that Apple would automatically do this rather than make it an option that I could select IF I wanted to do it.

It was an option, you were prompted for it during the setup. The option may have been checked by default, but you had the oppurtunity to uncheck it before proceeding. It wasn't Apple's fault that you missed it.

Do you have this box checked:

I think this solves your issue.

This features wasn't turned on automatically for me, it's off now and was off ever since I did an over the top update to Sierra.

Maybe a corrupted pref file on your machine during the update?

So it does work in the same way as Dropbox et al. Synced not moved?

Are saying that when you turned iCloud on it automatically turned Documents and Data on without you choosing to?