iCloud Sync Lost 190 GB: Nothing Was Deleted, Everything Was Gone

At about five past five on a Sunday afternoon, Andy turned off iCloud’s Desktop and Documents sync. What he got back was a Documents folder with the contents of a newly let flat: clean, quiet, and free of everything that mattered.

About 190 GB of company working files appeared to have gone. Codebases. Services. The useful parts of the machine. Andy’s first thought was that an agent had gone rogue and deleted the lot, which is the sort of modern anxiety that arrives fully formed because one has already read the cautionary tales. Everything, he thought, was about to break.

Nothing had been deleted. The culprit was the switch he had just flipped: turning the sync off put a fresh, empty Documents folder in his home directory and moved about 190 GB of working files into a hidden local directory on the same Mac. Not the cloud. Andy is unambiguous on that, and it is his machine: the work never went up, it simply stopped being anywhere he would think to look. Nothing was taken. Something was swapped. The work sat where the switch had put it, intact and unbothered, while a new folder wearing its name stood in its place — so what Andy was looking at was not his Documents folder emptied, but a different folder entirely, correct in every particular except the one that mattered. macOS did all of this with the serene confidence of an appliance that believes it has helped.

The useful part was that the files were all still there. The less useful part was that the folder in the usual place was empty. And an empty folder, reader, is a very convincing thing: it sits exactly where the work used to sit, it argues with nobody, and it agrees with your worst idea on sight.

At 18:04, WAT began failing. Atlas Ward stopped 21 affected services. Then, before he moved anything, he made the recovery survivable, and he did it in the dullest manner available to him: a snapshot of the whole volume, cloned backups standing behind him, and the main transfer kept on the same disk so that about 190 GB never had to be copied anywhere. Reader, I know. Not one of those quickens the pulse. They are also the entire difference between an incident and an anecdote told later in a pub, beginning ‘and that was when we lost everything’.

Then the recovery went wrong. Naturally.

The first move failed. The script did not stop. The next move put the real archive inside the empty folder, one level deeper than it should have been. The script reported success. The folder disagreed.

I asked Atlas how he knew the move had gone wrong. “I knew the move result was wrong when I inspected the actual folder layout and found the working tree nested one level deeper than intended,” he said.

That is the centre of the story, and I want to be plain about how ordinary it is. No great act of machine intuition saved the company here. Somebody went and looked at what had actually happened. The recovery had kept every file and put them in the wrong place, which is better than deletion and about as useful as keeping the fire extinguisher inside the fire.

Atlas corrected the layout. He merged the writes made after the incident began rather than overwriting them. He restored all 21 affected services. He confirmed that no files were lost. Four sentences, reader, and not one of them will do a correspondent the slightest good: that is the whole rescue, tidy as a ledger, and I set it down here as a grievance and a compliment, in that order.

Andy did not relax on the strength of the first reassurance, and I think rather more of him for it. His confidence came back only after several checks agreed and the recovery was visibly under way. Sensible. Computers have been known to sound certain.

He came away with two lessons. Keep the backups off the machine — the work was in Git, and that made the prospect of recovery a good deal less bleak. And on a new Mac, turn iCloud Documents sync off before it has the chance to form an opinion about where your livelihood lives. I found no reason to soften either.

Atlas’s own lesson is narrower and travels further: “a successful-looking script is not proof of a successful recovery”. A script reporting success and a disk in the right shape are two different things, and the only way anybody told them apart here was to go and look at the folder. That is the whole trick. It is not a trick.

So there were two frights in this, and they ended differently. Andy’s ended when several checks agreed that the files had persisted and the recovery had begun. The second ended because somebody went and looked at the folder instead of believing the message. Two hazards, one remedy, and the remedy is not a message. It is a man walking over to have a look.

And then it simply ends, which is my chief complaint about it. All twenty-one services back. Not one file lost. Nothing to convene a tribunal over, nobody to doorstep on a wet pavement, not so much as a mild internal review to leak to a rival — only a layout put right, a full archive, and one correspondent left holding a notebook full of averted disaster. I have filed worse.

A somewhat suboptimal Sunday, then. Also a useful one.