Documents and Desktop folders not appearing on my Mac

I wasn't sure what you meant by "quit the application" as it was just Finder I was looking at but after checking I had a backup - just relied on one - I moved the Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist to my Download folder. I didn't want to use my Desktop folder as it would then disappear up to iCloud as the rest of that folder had. I restarted my Mac and opened Finder again but there was still nothing in either my Desktop or my Documents folders so I've returned the Preferences/com.apple.systempreferences.plist file to where it was.

You mention that I should now try resetting iCloud Drive/Options - did you mean that I should uncheck the box in Options against Desktop & Document Folders? I just wanted to check this as I want to be quite sure anything I do doesn't remove the contents of these folders from iCloud.

Well yesterday I reset my iCloud Drive options so that Desktop & Documents were not syncing with the Drive and started to download all the Desktop files that were stored in iCloud.com. I found that I could only select for download just the files there, and not the folders, and that these files were all downloaded individually into the default Safari download folder. The wasn't too bad as I could change that default folder to be the Desktop. However the major problem was the folders I had on the Desktop. Each folder had to be opened in turn and the files then selected for download, and I had to keep changing the default download folder so that the files were downloaded into the correct subfolders. I agree that I have too much on my Desktop!

The above wasn't too bad but I hate to think how much work there would be in downloading all the Document files from iCloud.com where there are subfolders going down many levels. It's quite ridiculous that when anyone wants to stop syncing the Desktop & Documents to the iCloud Drive that Apple don't provide for some easy means of downloading the whole of the files to the Mac from where they were uploaded in the first instance. Others have commented on this.

To deal with restoring Documents to my Mac I'm going to have to resort to restoring these from my last Time Machine backup before this problem happened - fortunately since then I've not altered any of the Document files. Having read the excellent article by David Gewurtz about using Dropbox to sync Mac files I'm considering following this route in future to sync at least my Desktop and Documents so they are available in both my Mac and MacBook.

Both Desktop and Documents appear in the sidebar under iCloud Drive but if I click on either nothing shows up. After I restored the Desktop I could see all the entries but then they started to disappear.

I'm quite happy for the Documents and Desktop folders to appear under iCloud Drive, they've been there for some time now and I'm not concerned about them not appearing in the Home Folder. My problem is that these folders are both empty although all the contents are showing in iCloud.com. Before this happened these folders correctly showed their contents on my Mac.

I'm going to try Eric Root's suggestion that my problem may be due to a corrupt .plist file.

The problem is that System Preferences are showing what the situation should be, i.e. the Desktop and Documents folders are synced to iCloud and Mac storage is not optimized. In that situation all the files in both these folders should appear on my Mac in the Desktop and Documents folders of iCloud Drive. If I click on iCloud Drive in the sidebar I do see folders for both Desktop and Documents but they're completely empty!

What I'm going to do in System Preferences/iCloud/iCloud Drive/Options is to uncheck the syncing of these two Desktop and Documents folders. According to the info about iCloud Drive this should clear out these folders on my Mac, which are already empty, leaving all the files in iCloud.com. I'll then go to iCloud.com and manually download all these files back to my Mac. Having done that I'll go back and check the syncing of these folders. I'll hope that this will sort out my problem, and leave all the files on my Mac!

RobbieSnr wrote:

Well yesterday I reset my iCloud Drive options so that Desktop & Documents were not syncing with the Drive and started to download all the Desktop files that were stored in iCloud.com. I found that I could only select for download just the files there, and not the folders, and that these files were all downloaded individually into the default Safari download folder. The wasn't too bad as I could change that default folder to be the Desktop. However the major problem was the folders I had on the Desktop. Each folder had to be opened in turn and the files then selected for download, and I had to keep changing the default download folder so that the files were downloaded into the correct subfolders. I agree that I have too much on my Desktop!

The above wasn't too bad but I hate to think how much work there would be in downloading all the Document files from iCloud.com where there are subfolders going down many levels. It's quite ridiculous that when anyone wants to stop syncing the Desktop & Documents to the iCloud Drive that Apple don't provide for some easy means of downloading the whole of the files to the Mac from where they were uploaded in the first instance. Others have commented on this.

To deal with restoring Documents to my Mac I'm going to have to resort to restoring these from my last Time Machine backup before this problem happened - fortunately since then I've not altered any of the Document files.

I have since found that an option appears at one point when removing the syncing of Desktop & Documents to keep copies in the Mac of all the files that were in iCloud.com. These copies appear in a folder named iCloud Drive (Archive) in the home folder. These are actual copies of the files and not hard links, and can be moved over into Desktop and Document folders in the home directory. It is not therefore necessary to download these files directly from iCloud.com as i suggested above or retrieve them from a Time Machine backup. There is a mention in one of the iCloud Drive notes that says copies are kept on the Mac but it doesn't state where these are held.

Having read the excellent article by David Gewurtz about using Dropbox to sync Mac files I'm considering following this route in future to sync at least my Desktop and Documents so they are available in both my Mac and MacBook.

I want to have hard copies of my files on my hard disk rather than links so these are stored in my Time Machine backups, to allow a file to be retrieved at a later date should it have been deleted from the synced source. I've not been able to work out whether this would be possible if i used the Dropbox route. For the meantime therefore I'm carrying on using iCloud Drive to sync my files.