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iCloud Drive - Desktop & Documents Folders

If I turn on Desktop & Documents on my Mac on Sierra, will those iCloud Drive folders be visible on my other Mac on El Capitan? I'm guessing they will be and that the El Capitan Mac will have two Documents folders (one in iCloud and one on the Mac) ... does that sound right?
 
TurboPGT! said:
Uh of course, what is there not to like? It stores your Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud. It doesn't interfere with normal use. Also couldn't be happier with iCloud Photo Library, it does exactly what its supposed to do: Stores all photo and video in the cloud, automatically. Every device can access. Devices with more storage can keep local copies. Devices with less storage can brilliantly optimize and still have access. Could not be better.

I find people typically have their own niche ideas that make very little real world sense, and would adversely affect the experience for 90% of users, are often the ones "unhappy" with perfectly executed features.
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I have to agree. With iCloud photo library Apple nailed it. Previous Apple internet and cloud solutions had a lot of issues. iCloud photo library works completely issue free. In particular I love the way it optimizes photo storage to device available memory.
 
grahamperrin said:
From the second sentence: "your Desktop and Documents folder are moved (not copied) from your home folder". That's technically wrong, I can not recommend the article.
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Can you explain a little further please? I'm a little confused on what is actually does.
 
The Der Flounder article states that files are not copied.

Truly, files are copied.

After all eligible files are copied, in a Terminal window you can view output from the following command:

du -hs ~/Desktop ; du -hs ~/Documents
 
Multiple Macs

grahamperrin said:
… no attempt to merge …
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As far as I know (without testing) that's still the case. From https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/177633#177633 (2016-09-11):

>> … The iMac, which was synced second, created a folder within the Documents folder on iCloud entitled "Documents - iMac." …

iCloud Drive Desktop and Documents: beta report of dataloss from no distinction between multiple Macs

Potentially alarming. From https://forums.developer.apple.com/message/210990#207323 (2017-01-22, the day before 10.12.3 was released):

… if the file/folder had the same name, only one copy survived.

If "FileA.txt" from Mac A had 10kb, and "FileA.txt" from Mac B had 20GB, then the file from Mac A would over write the "FileA.txt" from Mac B, essentially wiping out the 20GB file.
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About the macOS Sierra 10.12.3 Update - Apple Support – no mention of changes to iCloud functionality so if the lack of distinction did occur, I should treat it as a serious bug.
 
sananda said:
If I turn on Desktop & Documents on my Mac on Sierra, will those iCloud Drive folders be visible on my other Mac on El Capitan? I'm guessing they will be and that the El Capitan Mac will have two Documents folders (one in iCloud and one on the Mac) ... does that sound right?
Click to expand...

Do you have any new information about this?

I've enabled Desktop & Documents in iCloud Drive. In two new computers that are running High Sierra and Mojave there's no problem, but an old MabBook Pro who still in El Capitan (latest version available for this computer) I can't access now to any iCloud document. I'm having a problem with iCloud Drive in this computer since some months ago and I can't access to iCloud Drive in Finder with this computer. I tried login out and login in to my iCloud account several times and it's impossible to use iCloud Drive in this computer now. All the other things are working (Calendars, Mail, Notes, etc.) but no iCloud Drive.

I'm thinking that maybe it's a problem related to the option about to sync Documents and Desktop that I activated some time ago in newer computers... Any idea?
 
I tried to create a new iCloud account and on that one I had no problems on the same computer. However, in my usual iCloud account I can’t synchronize iCloud Drive in Finder, even after trying it on another user and after a clean install of El Capitan on the same computer.

So, I definitely considered that it was a problem with my iCloud account and contacted Apple.

Apple technical support made several checks on my computer even with captures of information that they took to analyze the problem and scaled the issue to higher departments to see if they found a solution, thus reaching the engineering department of iCloud drive. There they pointed out that there are currently two versions of the iCloud system, one of them is more updated than the other. Some accounts already have the updated version of the iCloud system and others do not. Those with the updated version are NO LONGER COMPATIBLE WITH THE CAPTAIN. The accounts that maintain the old version of iCloud, continue to run smoothly. This is something that the user can't seem to choose, so iCloud may at some time to break the compatibility with El Capitan without prior notice. And since El Capitan is a system considered obsolete by Apple, there is no possible solution.

That said, when iCloud Drive stops working on an account with El Capitan, synchronization with iBooks and Safari bookmarks also stops working.
 
It seems pretty ridiculous to me that an operating system realised as recently as September 2015 will not work for everyone on a core feature like iCloud Drive.
 
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