Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud

The Documents and Desktop folders on my iMac seem to be gone. All that remains are the ones in my iCloud Drive.

This is what's in my iCloud Drive:

This is what is on my hard drive:

The Documents Folder and Desktop folder no longer appear here.

I thought that when I upgraded to Sierra and synced the Desktop and Documents folders to iCloud, they would "mirror" -- much as they do with Dropbox. Now it appears that they have actually moved into the Cloud.

My concerns are:

1. If I lose Wi-Fi, how can I work on my documents if the Documents folder no longer exists on my iMac?

2. I use a Time Capsule and Time Machine to back up my hard drive. Am I no longer creating backups of the items in my Documents folder and my Desktop? If not, I feel confident that Apple is doing a good job of backing up everything in iCloud -- but how can I resurrect an old version of a file if I accidentally delete it or if it becomes corrupted?

Posted on Oct 16, 2016 11:03 AM

35 replies

Oct 16, 2016 7:23 PM in response to Barney-15E

Barney - your "mirrored" description sounds spot on and fits with what Apple refers to as synchronization which occurs between the iCloud and local hard drive.

Good luck with your TM recovery testing. I suspect you'll find it simply works as before like I did. I'd even wager Apple designed the process to deal with a scenario where someone left an iCloud Document's file open by accident on another cloud based device such as an iPad or iPhone during a TM file recovery from their iMac.

regards,

Dave

Barney-15E

Level 10

122,078 points

Oct 16, 2016 7:35 PM in response to blackdogaudio

Good luck with your TM recovery testing. I suspect you'll find it simply works as before like I did. I'd even wager Apple designed the process to deal with a scenario where someone left an iCloud Document's file open by accident on another cloud based device such as an iPad or iPhone during a TM file recovery from their iMac.

Thanks for that info. I was just going to reply to my own post indicating that you had already tested TM, but now that you point out the open file issue, I will focus a bit on that.

Jan 15, 2017 8:41 AM in response to Barney-15E

I was just being simplistic with my terminology - as far as the end-user is concerned they can't see them in the Home folder but can see them in the iCloud Drive folder – so visually it has moved.

Jan 24, 2017 1:04 PM in response to Dirtylobster

Regarding Parallels, the Parallels Toolbox has an app that is called

Hide Desktop.app

I must have turned it on - after finding my customary desktop on OS X was gone.

Nov 18, 2017 8:44 PM in response to think.different

Hi, please does in anyway make it impossible to put things on your desktop, for example app icon and other files, when i try to put them on the desktop it doesn't copy. Thanks

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Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud