So I updated a machine with a bunch of files on the Desktop and in the Documents folder, and when I upgraded it asked me if I wanted to store these folders on iCloud as well. I hit YES and it began trying to upload everything. Now, I guess I had a large file in one of the folders because the total upload was almost 9GB [i have 200GB of available iCloud space]. It failed the upload and has just been stuck on 57kb of 8.89GB uploaded for over a day. I've tried restarting and it hasn't moved. I haven't found a way to quit it either. This has been making my machine incredibly slow and has caused the fans to speed up like crazy. Anytime I try to access an Open or Save dialog, the app I'm using crashes, whether it's Preview, Xcode, Photoshop, or even Safari.
So I went to the iCloud system preferences and unchecked the "Desktop and Documents" item. I figured it wouldn't delete things that were still locally saved on my disk. But I was wrong and now every single file on both my Desktop and in my Documents is gone. Not in the trash, nowhere to be found. Gone.
Can any one help me with this? Has anyone experienced something similar? The iCloud upload is still there and still isn't progressing at all [not sure what its trying to upload anyways since the files were all deleted]. My computer is unusable and my files are all gone. I have a Time Machine backup from last week, but I will not have access to for almost 2 more weeks so if there's a way to recover my files sooner and kill this upload task, that would be amazing.
Thanks.
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.
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.
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].