Cannot delete Desktop and Documents folder from iCloud Drive after accidentally enabling their storage on iCloud
From my MacBook's Finder window, I deleted the empty Desktop folder from iCloud Drive and then immediately emptied the trash before the folder had time to reappear in iCloud Drive. The folder did not reappear.
After a few seconds iCloud refreshed and the Documents folder was deleted from my iOS device as well!
I then followed the same steps to delete the empty Documents folder.
Cheers!
Using trash works for me as well.
There is a delete immediately (in case you don't want to empty trash, also easier than racing to beat the iCloud Drive restore of Desktop and Documents) option - click OPT+CMD+Delete
There are prompts to answer to confirm the in place deletion you must answer for the delete to happen.
2020: It's still happening using macOS 11.1 Big Sur
I had a small file on the Desktop that I deleted in Finder, it went in the bin as expected. Every time I emptied the bin then file would reappear in the bin after a few seconds.
Delete using Finder
I tried the methods mentioned here by Kevin R. & ROG:
- Emptying trash immediately: nope
- CMD + OPT + Delete: nope
- Renaming the file, then deleting: nope
- Moving the file out of an iCloud Drive folder: nope
Also tried from Terminal using rm -f. The file reappeared every time.
Online iCloud Drive
Sign-in to iCloud drive via https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/
The file was there in the Recently Deleted page so I deleted the file from there. It did disappear from my Mac's bin and them promptly reappeared after a few seconds on the Recently Deleted page and on my Mac.
I reasoned iCloud Drive identifies files by hashing their contents and that's why the rename would not work. The file's hash was stuck somewhere in the sync process.
What worked for me:
To remove the file, firstly alter it's contents, in this case I renamed it to be a .txt file, then opened the renamed file in a text editor, added some extra random characters, then saved the file. As the contents changed, the hash used by iCloud also changed.
After deleting the updated file, it no longer reappeared in the bin, or anywhere else. SUCCESS!
So alter the contents of the file, then delete.