You can make a difference in the Apple Support Community!

When you sign up with your Apple Account, you can provide valuable feedback to other community members by upvoting helpful replies and User Tips.

💡 Did you know?

⏺ If you can't accept iCloud Terms and Conditions... Learn more >

⏺ If you don't see your iCloud notes in the Notes app... Learn more >

Looks like no one’s replied in a while. To start the conversation again, simply ask a new question.

kiwigirl00 Author

Level 1

11 points

Deleting icloud documents also deleted them from the local drive

Hi all, is this normal.....I have my documents folder backing up to the icloud. I recently cleaned up some of my icloud files and deleted a few of my old docs. When I went back into my documents folder on my local/hard drive, I noticed those files are no longer there.

I didn't think that deleting a file from the cloud would delete the actual source file from the hard drive - but does this happen? I think of the cloud like a 'shadow', and if you delete the shadow you still have the 'real thing'.

MacBook Pro (2020 and later)

Posted on Aug 7, 2021 5:03 PM

Top-ranking reply

FoxFifth

Level 10

472,227 points

Posted on Aug 7, 2021 6:18 PM

That is normal. iCloud Drive is a syncing service. What you do on a device or on iCloud.com is synced with all devices and iCloud. If you have documents that you don't want on iCloud but want to retain on your Mac, use Finder on the Mac and move the files out of the folders that sync with iCloud to a folder that does not. You can, for example, create a new folder in your home directory and move the files there.

Also, you may be able to recover the deleted files by logging into www.icloud.com and then click Settings (near the top middle of that page) and then go to the Advanced section of the Settings page there.

View in context

Deleting icloud documents also deleted them from the local drive

Similar questions