The iCloud Drive folder is intended to synchronize our files and folders in the cloud to make our day-to-day life easier, but sometimes its configuration is capable of giving more than one scare. One of the biggest happens when you turn off iCloud Drive and suddenly all the files and folders on your desktop disappear.
The biggest scare a Mac can give you
First of all: don’t worry, you haven’t lost any information. What has happened is that, whether you are aware of it or not, you had the Desktop folder (and also Documents) stored in iCloud Drive. This is a function that macOS has and that looks for all your Macs to have the same thing in those two folders, and that until recently was activated by default unless you deactivated it in the first boot assistant.
Having disabled iCloud Drive, what has happened is that the content of your desktop has been desynchronized and has disappeared from your computer, but still saved in iCloud Drive. And now on the Mac you have an empty local Desktop folder.
What can you do to recover the files you had on Desktop? Easy: Reactivate iCloud Drive temporarily and they’ll reappear. Then move them to a local directory (such as Downloads), turn off iCloud Drive again so that the local desktop is prioritized and move all your files there again. Once you have finished this process, you can delete the iCloud Drive desktop without fear. You can do the same process with the Documents folder, if you use it to store some data there.
Newer Macs no longer turn on Desktop and Documents folders to sync with iCloud Drive by default, and I daresay because of the confusion it caused. Many users keep GB and GB of data on their desktop, and that can overwhelm iCloud in a matter of minutes if suddenly that synchronization is activated. I’ve personally resolved many such conflicts on a multitude of general user Macs, so Apple must have spotted the problem as well.
