What Happens When You Turn Off Desktop & Documents Folders for iCloud Drive?

Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let's look what happens when you remove Desktop and Documents folders from iCloud Drive. 

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So this is a question I get asked fairly often. Someone wants to turn-off the Desktop and Documents feature in iCloud Drive. They are hit with a Warning dialogue box. In fact in the question people will claim that the warning says that it is going to Delete the files in their Desktop and Documents folder. It actually doesn't way that at all. If you read it carefully it tells you exactly what it is going to do. But first it is important to understand exactly what this feature does. 

So, when you have Desktop and Documents in iCloud Drive turned On those two folders are in iCloud Drive. So here I am in a Finder window. On the left, under iCloud, I selected iCloud Drive. Here I see all of the folders at the top level of iCloud Drive. Included there are the Desktop and Documents folders. Now the Desktop folder is a special folder where every file in it is also shown on your Desktop. As you can see these three files here. But the Document's folder doesn't do anything like that but it is kind of convention that the Documents folder is the main folder where you keep most of your files. So by turning On the Desktop and Document features of iCloud Drive you have both of these folders here in iCloud Drive. You can see this is where they are located. However, if you weren't using this feature these folders wouldn't be here. Instead they would be in your Home folder. I have my Home folder here under Favorites. I can click to go there and I can see several folders in my Home folder that are always there, like Pictures, Movies, and Downloads. But if I had Desktop and Documents folders turned Off I would also see Desktop and Documents here.

Now the folders in your Home folder are all contained on your local drive and have nothing to do with iCloud Drive. Any files you put in there would just be on your Mac. You wouldn't be able to see them on other Macs, on your iPhone, or your iPad. But folders in iCloud Drive, all of these, you can see in iCloud Drive in other Macs. You can see them on your iPhone in the Files App, and in the Files App on your iPad. So that is why it is great to have the Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive because it means these two folders will sync across all of your devices. You will be looking at the same set of files no matter which device you're using. That's true of everything here in iCloud Drive. 

But with these being the two main folders where most people store their files it is really useful to be able to have all your files, no matter which device you created them on, no matter which one you're editing them on, they are all the same files you're working with across all your devices. That's the whole idea of using iCloud Drive. You create something on your Mac and then you can look at it on your iPhone. You can edit it on your iPad. You go back to your Mac and all those changes are there. It is just one file that you now view across all of your devices. That is true of every folder in iCloud Drive. Not just Desktop & Documents. It is just nice to have those folders there so they have this feature.

So here I've got three files here in my Desktop folder. You can see them here on the Desktop as well. In Documents I have a whole bunch of folders and if you look here you can see I've got 254 items taking up 363 MB of space. Now having these folders in iCloud Drive is a great idea. I definitely recommend that you do that. If you decide they are taking up too much space and maybe you want to not have as many things in iCloud Drive, well I'm going to show you some alternatives. But for now let's talk about what happens if you turn this feature Off. 

So if I go into System Settings and then I go to my Apple ID here and then to iCloud, and then iCloud Drive, then in macOS Ventura you turn off Desktop & Documents folders by going to Options here and it is the first item. If I turn it Off here's that Warning. Notice it never says that it is going to delete those files. Not at all! If you look at it very carefully it says, If you continue items will be removed from the Desktop & Documents folder on this Mac and will remain available in iCloud Drive. New items added to your Desktop or your Documents folder on this Mac will no longer be stored in iCloud Drive. 

What essentially is going to happen is it is going to leave the Desktop & Documents folders untouched and you'll still see them in iCloud Drive. But it will recreate the Desktop & Documents folders in your Home folder. But they will be empty. Those will be your actual Desktop & Documents folders. What you'll have is two sets of these folders. One on your local drive in the Home Folder and one in iCloud Drive in your iCloud Drive folder. Let's do it and I'll show you. So now you can see it turned it Off. Done. Now close System Settings here. Now under iCloud Drive notice Desktop & Documents are still there. If I look in Desktop there are those three files. But they are not here on the Desktop anymore because this is no longer the actual Desktop folder. This is just a folder in iCloud Drive called Desktop. On another Mac you may have this the actual Desktop folder for that Mac but for this Mac it has lost its special property of being the actual Desktop folder. It is just a folder named Desktop. 

The same thing for Documents. It's lost any special properties if may have had as a Documents folder and I'll show you one in a minute. Now if I go to the Home folder I notice I now have my Desktop & Documents folders back. You could see the little icon here for each of these shows that they are the actual Desktop & Documents folders. There is nothing in either one of these. They are empty. But if I were to create a new file and put it in my Desktop folder or put it in my Documents folder it would populate these in my local Home folder. I wouldn't see them on my other devices because those devices only see what is in iCloud Drive which contains these two folders. So now you've got two Desktop & Documents folders. A local set in your Home folder and an iCloud set that is only visible under iCloud Drive. The iClouds I see on the Desktop, they're from the Home folder Desktop folder. If I were to go and use Go and Desktop it goes into the Home folder Desktop folder. Then the special property of the Documents folder is if I use Go and then Documents or Shift Command O. Then you can see it goes to the local Home folder Documents' folder. Not the iCloud Drive folder.

But you can still access all your files here under iCloud Drive. They are all still there. They haven't changed at all through your other devices. It is only this Mac that has been effected by you turning this Off. So in effect you've got the best of both worlds. On this Mac the iCloud Drive Desktop folder is kind of pointless. It is just a regular folder. But maybe on another Mac that you own this is the actual Desktop. The Documents folder, though, is kind of useful. You've got an iCloud Documents folder now and you've got a local Documents folder. But most importantly you can see nothing got deleted. Everything on iCloud Drive is still on iCloud Drive. They are not just special folders anymore. 

Now let me show you a better way. Let's turn this back On again. I reestablished the Desktop & Documents folders in iCloud Drive to be these special folders with those names. The Desktop folder now matches what you see on the Desktop. If you were to go to the Documents folder you're now in the Documents folder in iCloud Drive. If I go to my Home folder here you could see the Desktop & Documents folders are gone. They have been removed. They were empty. They weren't needed anymore. I just have one set of Desktop & Documents folders. 

Now there are two better alternatives to turning this Off. One is to go back into System Settings, go to your Apple ID, go to iCloud and then turn On Optimize Mac Storage. When you have that On what happens is not all of your files are going to be cached locally. So everything is on iCloud Drive all the time but some of your files, like for instance these here with the little cloud with the down arrow, that means that this file isn't taking up space on your local drive. You still see that it is there, that it exists. But if you go to Open it, it will actually download it first and then open it. Now you could see this file is available on your local drive and you can access it even when you're offline. You could always Control Click on a file and then Remove Download to remove it and Control Click again and Download Now to force it to download while you're online. So you can decide what files are there and what files aren't or just have iCloud automatically figure that out based on your usage. 

So that is the solution if you've got plenty of space on iCloud Drive but not plenty of space on your local hard drive. However, if the opposite is true, if you've got plenty of space on your local drive but not space on iCloud Drive then the thing to do would be to go back to your Home folder. Remember your Home folder contains files that are only on your local drive. Create a new folder here to  hold some files. Call it, Local Documents. This folder is now empty but if I open up another Finder window here, Go to the Documents folder and then say, grab a folder here that I only want to be local, not on iCloud Drive. Then I can move that into Local Documents. You can see it is even going to warn me things removed from iCloud Drive. So my other devices won't see them anymore. So I move it and now I've got this folder full of files available only locally in my Local Documents folder that I created and no longer in iCloud Drive.

So if you want to limit how much stuff is on iCloud Drive because you're running out of space then instead of turning Off Desktop & Documents folders leave that On. That's too useful to turn Off. But instead create a local documents folder or something else in your Home folder and move files from iCloud Drive to Local Documents that you know you won't need anywhere else. Alternatively, instead of in your Home folder you may have an external drive and you could move the files there as well. Removing them from iCloud Drive and just having them on that external drive attached to that one Mac. 

So I hope this makes this feature a little clearer and what happens if you've got it turned On and you want to turn it Off. Also some better alternatives instead of turning Off Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive. Thanks for watching.