zerobytes

I just lost quite a few project files from being rash in my response to this problem, but I think I figured out what happened. I archived about a terabyte of project files in my iCloud and recently got around to trying to back them up to an external drive. When I did this, I thought it would suffice to just hit the 'Download Now' option in the right-click menu, or to click the cloud download icon next to the folder in iCloud. Sometimes, I think the amount of data being requested would bottleneck somewhere along the way, and my download would get stuck (probably timed out). I'd come back to my computer a few hours later and see that many of the files were now zero bytes in size, but with their preview and file name in tact. What really happened is that your computer failed to retrieve the files and instead just has a 'shell' file for where the data it meant to download was supposed to go. However, the original files are still present on iCloud, fully intact. You just have no way of retrieving them through Finder. Whatever you do, don't delete the files, because you don't want that to sync with the server and overwrite the good versions. Now you have two options: you can download the files from the iCloud website, or if you have another Mac with iCloud enabled, you can download your files on that through Finder, and they should come through fine. I would opt for the latter if you have the choice, especially for larger files. To avoid having the issue happen again, I recommend doing this one project file at a time. Once you've retrieved the working files, you can delete the zero byte versions from your iCloud Drive folders. Hopefully this helps, I did some googling and couldn't find anyone talking about this solution.