New posts

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="MacInWin" data-source="post: 1849353" data-attributes="member: 396914">LIAB, you have used lots of variations of iCloud and iCloud drive to the point where I don't really know what you are doing. As I see it, there are three forces at play: iCloud Drive is a syncing folder on the Mac or iDevice where if you put files, they get synced up to the iCloud Drive in the sky; iCloud itself is a syncing service that can sync across devices logged into your AppleID for things like Messages, Mail, etc, and which can unload files in Documents and Desktop to the cloud service if you tell it to do so; and iCloud.com, where these various files and folders can be seen from any browser. So, you said By "iCloud Documents" folder did you mean a folder on the iCloud drive? Not sure what you actually did, but from the description that sounded like what you did. In which case what you saw is exactly what you should see. What does "root folder" mean in that context? iCloud drive does not copy the root of anything, just what you put in the iCloud drive folder. Then it should sync up to the iCloud drive at iCloud.com and be available to any and all devices also logged into that same AppleID. The ~/Library/Mobile Documents is not meant for the user to manipulate, although you can do so. So when you copy something from that normally-hidden folder to your Home folder the download occurs because your demand for that file means iCloud has to copy it into the Mobile Documents folder for you to do anything with it and then another copy is put where you want it to be, i.e., your Home folder. That, too, is how it works. That tells me that in System Preferences for that MBA, AppleID, iCloud Drive, Options, the "Desktop & Documents Folders" is checked, that is to say, the MBA is storing the Documents and Desktop at iCloud, not on the MBA (unless you ask for them). The actual location in System Prefs is version-dependent, I described Catalina. I think iCloud was listed in Sys Prefs previously.That looks like the Desktop copy is an alias to the one in the ~/Library/Mobile Documents. The filesize shown in the iCloud Drive folder is taken from what is reported as the file size in the cloud. But it's not the space taken up on the drive. And when you try to get to the Desktop copy when disconnected, it cannot stream the file down for you. So far, working as advertised.Not toasted, just overwritten. And when you re-establish the connection, the new and unusable file is synced, so you lose the copy in the cloud. But again, that's how the system works. YOU put the link into the folder, so the system assumes you know what you are doing and syncs up that new, short file with the same name.Not to be terribly rude, but the system is working exactly as you told it to do. Consider this: the system does not know that the file on your desktop is not valid, nor that it is not what you really want. All it knows is that the file on the Desktop was moved into the iCloud folder and amended the existing file there. It could have been that you legitimately had a file with that name, worked on it using some application, saved it back to the drive and put it on the Desktop, realized you wanted it in the cloud so you copied it to the iCloud drive. Now what I think it should have done is to tell you that a file by that name already existed and to confirm that you wanted to replace it, but you didn't report that it did that. Did it do that, by the way? In any event, once the new file was saved in the iCloud drive folder, the system did exactly what it is designed to do, sync to the cloud so all other devices can now access the updated file. That is how it is supposed to work.Apple has made it more confusing that it needs to be by sharing the "iCloud" term. Let me try to describe it by using X for the iCloud Drive folder, Y for the iCloud sync service and Z for the feature to store Documents and Desktop files in the cloud. For now I'll ignore Mobile Documents because that is not intended for users to muck with. So, you have turned on X and have a folder where if you put a file or folder it gets copied to the cloud (generic) and where any other machine using X can also get to that file or folder. That is kind of like Dropbox, or Google Drive, or OneDrive from MS. It works with or without Y or Z. It's just a file sync service so that all devices pointing to that X drive see the same version of the file last saved. The Y service syncs up lots of things, but not the files synced by X, except that the Z option is available as part of Y. So you can have Y with or without Z and you can have Y and/or Z without X. What Z does is to move everything from the Documents and Desktop folder from ~/ folder to the cloud and replaces them with links, saving space on the internal drive. But it doesn't copy or sync any of the other folder or files in ~/, just Documents and Desktop. (Thought problem; does it copy X as well? After all, those items are already in the cloud. I think it does, because Z is separate from X totally.) When the user wants a file and clicks on it, Z downloads it from the cloud and when it is saved back to the same folder, Z copies it back to the cloud, overwriting what is there if the name is the same. So, in your example, you have a file you have copied to the Desktop, which got synced up to Z because it was turned on and connected. Then you disconnected, and what was left on the local Desktop was just a pointer file with 192 bytes. You then copied that 192 byte file into the X folder. At that point, as far as the system was concerned, you wanted to replace what was in X with this 192 byte file. Then you reconnected and everything synced up, which meant that the 192 byte file was sent to the X version in the cloud to replace the full file there. In your words, it got "toasted" because you toasted it. And since the X folder is included in the Z sync, as soon as you overwrote X and synced, Z got toasted as well.How to prevent that? Well, what you can do is to keep X, Y and Z separated. Frankly, I don't use Z at all because, as I said, I want my files even when not connected, so I only use Z and Y. But if you do want to use all three, then be careful about how you move files from X to the folders synced by Z, particularly when offline. I would maybe even go so far as to create a new folder at the ~/ level, maybe called "Unsynced" and when I moved a file from X, put it there rather than in Desktop or Documents, where it gets synced by Z. Then I can edit and manipulate it from "Unsynced" until I get it finalized and then copy from "Unsynced" to Desktop or Documents or X, whichever I choose. If Desktop/Documents, then the Z process will then sync and overwrite the cloud version with the new and if X, the normal sync will to the same. Now you might argue that eventually everything you use will be in "Unsynced" and you would be correct in that. And that is an additional reason for not using Z at all.And don't much with anything in ~/Library/Mobile Documents because that bypasses all the checks in the system, such as they are.Is that any clearer, or have I fogged your mind completely?</blockquote>

Verification: Name this item 🌈