iCloud Files lost to Safari.download?

[danmart]

Recently a number of files I kept in iCloud went from being PDF files (downloaded long ago in many cases) to showing as ‘Safari.dowload’ files in Finder on iOS. This made the files seemingly inaccessible.

Has anyone else experienced this?

Fortunately all the affected files were ones I knew which storefront I bought them from and could download new copies. I didn’t explore recovering them from Time Machine which would have been my next port of call.

 

[cynics]

Uniform Type Identifier issue more than likely....

Are you letting the PDF download by long pressing a link and tapping download and then maybe it sits in the downloads folder for an extended period of time? If so open the PDF and save to Files so you gain ownership of the file (vs Safari.download).

 

[danmart]

Thanks for the reply, however this problem was that files which were already downloaded successfully suddenly became ‘safari.download’ files. So I wasn’t attempting to download from a site, these were files already in my iCloud storage.