MacOS – Hidden Documents folder after turning off iCloud Drive

deletingdocuments-in-the-clouddropboxicloudmacos

I recently tried iCloud Drive for syncing my Desktop and Documents folders. However, Documents was already being synced via Dropbox and I noticed that iCloud Drive and Dropbox don't get along. Seemingly random files inside Documents were copied over and over again for some reason.

So I decided to revert back to Dropbox and turn off iCloud sync. That worked fine on my iMac. However, doing the exact same thing on my MacBook Air made the Documents folder disappear. I quickly realized that it is only hidden (see screenshot), albeit without a preceding dot (.). I'm now struggling to unhide this folder. Any ideas?

Best Answer

Try run this in Terminal:

chflags nohidden ~/Documents

Related Solutions

ICloud – How Do I Know If A File Has Been Successfully Synced To iCloud Drive

OS X 10.10.2 now has graphical upload progress bars:

enter image description here

When things get stuck, or you have a slower upload, there is a brctl tool that ships with Yosemite to monitor changes in all iCloud backed documents. Open terminal and type the following command:

brctl log --wait --shorten

On macOS Catalina 10.15 use the following command:

brctl log -w --shorten

It will show you a brief summary of the sync changes both up and down. The wait causes it to run continuously until you close the window or issue Control+C to quit brctl process. If you are familiar with the grep command line tool, you could filter the results to just show upload progress, but most iCloud accounts are quite low volume in terms of changes, so your upload of many files will likely dominate the results.

https://www.icloud.com/#iclouddrive

Also, the empirical way to tell if a file is synced is to log in to iCloud drive on the web interface and verify a file and/or folder is up there in the clouds.

IOS – Folders disappeared from iCloud Drive following path name change

Depending on the number of files you have, iCloud Drive can take a while to get itself situated.

I would move the files somewhere safe that is not part of iCloud and is easy to get to. Leaving them where they are should also work. Then, turn off iCloud Drive and follow all the prompts. It’ll want to “finish updating,” which you can skip. It’ll leave a folder in your home folder that’s an archive of some files it thought may not be uploaded yet.

Once everything is off, re-enable it. Wait until everything comes back. This can take a long time (hours) and it may look like nothing is happening. It will finish.

Once everything is back, make sure your data is all there and delete the old stuff.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

ICloud – How Do I Know If A File Has Been Successfully Synced To iCloud Drive

IOS – Folders disappeared from iCloud Drive following path name change

Related Question