iCloud deleted all my Desktop and Documents files

hey, I think there is a way to restore deleted file from iCloud. You can find that option by logging into iCloud from the browser and go to setting. Then you will see restore files. However, the files are only kept for some days (I am not sure how long) before it is permanently removed. Good luck.

I had something similar happen to me when I enabled icloud drive. I think I went into icloud drive settings to untick Desktop items from being backed up and they promptly disappeared.

went to Finder, and it appears everything has been moved into the iCloud Drive folder (shortcut on the top left in Finder)

went back into iCloud drive settings in Preferences, ticked desktop items then everything reappeared.

really really weird.. but it's definitely a lesson in preparing backups before upgrading to dev previews!

It's a bit disappointing reading this every year with every beta. People... if you read this and have not yet installed beta 1 then don't do it. At least don't install it on your primary machine, on your primary hard drive, with your primary apple id and never do it without making an disk image before. (Like with superduper or similar software).

There will be bugs in beta1. Stuff won't work. All your data in iCloud might get lost at any point.

Only install it if you are developing some apps that need the new features on a developing machine. A beta 1 is not production ready.

+1

This isn't early access, it's beta testing. Even the Public Beta participants are told these things, and we're not even there yet.

I thought the point of testing was to find things like this. Imagine if this happened when they released this in the fall.

I had the same thing happen to me. I unchecked the iCloud Drive Settings and then rebooted. When it came back up, it was still trying to upload the files. I think the process was called "bird". You can check in the Activity Monitor. Once I dragged all the files out of the /iCloud Folder (local) back to my documents, then I let it percolate and things ended up being okay.

I think Apple needs to put a bit more of a delay in that (e.g. maybe two acceptance boxes). When I clicked on the yes box, I completely forgot that I had several gigs of files in both my corporate and personal Dropbox folders as well as my Onedrive folder. It was the Ondrive yakking at me saying the "default folder has moved" that tipped me off to what was going on. Moving those folders created a bit of a "***" moment. It's all good and the experiece I hope will help others as well as Apple really understand the complexity of moving the contents of the Documents folder to the cloud.

When iCloud sync for Documents and Desktop is enabled, macOS simply moves the folders to the iCloud Drive folder.

When you uncheck the Documents and Desktop settings, it breaks that link and creates new folders, but leaves your folders and files on iCloud drive.

Go to you iCloud drive and move the files back from the Documents and Dekstop folders in the iCloud drive to the ones in your home folder. Copy them, if you want them to also be on iCloud.

This is expressed in the dialog that shows up, but the wording is a bit obtuse.

I have confirmed that it works after I realized that most of my systems will choke on all the extra files, until they are all updated. Since a bunch of stuff breaks (Mail plug ins and my beloved AirFoil), I only have Sierra running on one partition of my Mac Pro.

Overall, it seems pretty stable!

Great! When i force quit "bird" on my Activity Monitor (which was using 99.7% of my CPU), it stopped the transfer and apps stopped crashing immediately on the Open / Save dialogs. It of course restarted the transfer, but now its actually progressing. I also followed advice from yellowchilli and rechecked the box and now my files re-appeared on my Desktop and in my Documents.

Thanks!

Has anyone done this on a second on third Mac? Do all the Desktop and Documents folder get munged into one assuming the same iCloud account? I definitely don't want that!

For what it's worth. When I've been messing around with this I can go to the Terminal.app and find all of my files evn when the Finder/Desktop are acting oddly.

I had the similar issue and I found my files in iCloud Drive (Archive).

The same thing happened to me when I changed my apple id email account. Everything went haywire and icloud deleted my desktop and documents folders. However, when I go into "all my files" in finder, all of the files that used to be on my desktop are in the all my files section.

Hope that helps

I had a similar experience to original poster; I lost all of my files.

On SystemPreferences/iCloud/iCloud Drive/Options, I checked the "Desktop a Document Folder". After several hours, all of my D&D files appeared top be on iCloud. However, the disk usage (Unix command du) showed that my mac's disk usage had not changed. Based on further reading, I decided that I didn't want D&D on iCloud, so I copied (or moved?) the files from iCloud Drive to my mac. When I thought they were there, I unchecked SystemPreferences/iCloud/iCloud Drive/Options/ "Desktop a Document Folder". Presto! my files were gone. Both places. Only aliases remained on my mac that couldn't be resolved.

Logging on to my mac as root, there was nothing there, even though the disk utilization looked appoximately right.

I tried the "restore" trick mentioned by another poster, above. iCloud Drive said it was trying to restore 1,000 files (a small fraction of what I had had), but reported problems doing so. None the less, many of those files were restored, without the directory structure; that is, they were simply dumped into one folder.

I managed to restore all files to my mac sucessfully from time machine of two days' prior.

I don't understand iCloud Drive, despite reading several articles by Apple and others. I dont' even know how to go about understanding what it did to my file system (after 35 years of programming on UNIX).

iCloud is an absolutely disgrace. As a software developer myself, I would feel totally ashamed to have produced a piece of software, like this. I use XCode, and iCloud kept deleting project files and reverting files back to previous versions. In the end I just copied all my XCode project folders into my home directory, which is unaffected by iCloud. I didn't dare turn iCloud off, after all the horror stories I have heard. My advice, is only use iCloud for things like Word/Text Documents or documents you don't mind losing...

I formatted my external HDD by mistake. This software http://appleinsider.com/articles/16/12/28/disk-drill-3-brings-file-recovery-tools-to-mac-hard-drives recover all my lost data, but it is just free to recover 1gb data, any way, it is money worthy. I've looked for some programs, but all they seem to do nothing, but this software works perfectly.

Hi guys i Think i found out where you can get all the data back (and i dont know why apple would do somthing like this as it is soo stupid) when you chosse to back up your files on icloud (Which i will never do again in the future) a sperate folder is made on you mac calles "icloud Drive (Archive)" it is located in Users > " your computer user name" > iCLoud Drive (Archive) - here you should find all your files that were just deleted ! (well at least i did)

Hpe this helps!