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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

Best reply

think.different

Level 4

1,311 points

Posted on Jan 14, 2017 11:47 AM

All the files would have still remained on your mac they would have just been moved to another folder in your Library folder in order to sync to the iCloud – read my other posts on this thread to get a better understanding.

That folder works in the same way as the DropBox, Box, OneDrive, etc. They are all located on your computer and then synced to their respect clouds.

This is where you will find that folder on your computer:

Your HD > Users > [your name] > Library > Mobile Documents > iCloud Drive

so Apple moves the documents folder from:

Your HD > Users > [your name] > Documents

and puts it into the iCloud Drive folder.

The only time when the only copy is in the cloud is if you also select "Optimize Mac Storage". Then when the mac is running low of local space it move unused content to only be in the cloud.

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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

112,728 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

Documents and Desktop folders in iCloud