I asked the same question on normal apple community, but I doubt people care. So I am asking here as it looks like more engineering question. Is this done by design?
I did rsync -avzP --remove-source-files between two locations in iCloud drive in terminal. Lot of *.icloud files were copied, removed from source but they did not appear in destinations. So essentially I lost several video files. Being desperate I tried to do this with another set of videos that I can not regret deleting and the results are the same - directories were copied, files was lost, source directories was not removed.
when I logged into iCloud drive on web browser and hit "recently deleted" there was zero files to recover. so what the hell? why rsync not copy properly important files? is it forbidden to ever touch *.icloud files?