iCloud drive on 2 Macs will desktop merge?

[diegovega]

I currently have 2 Macbook Pros, one for home use and another for work.

The work Macbook is running Sierra and currently has iCloud Drive activated, so everything that I have in my desktop is available in iCloud on my Home Macbook and iPhone for example.

The home Macbook is also running Sierra and has iCloud Drive OFF at the moment, but I’m considering turning it ON. What I DON’T want is for iCloud to merge both my desktops, so that I would find my home and work desktop files all mixed together in both of my Macbook’s desktops.

I want each Macbook to keep their own desktop separated as they are currently, and just to be able to access each other’s desktop files through iCloud drive in the Finder. At the moment in my iCloud Drive folder in the Finder I have a Desktop folder with my work Macbook’s files. If I enable iCloud Drive in my Home Macbook I would like to find a second Desktop folder called for example “Home Desktop” with the home Mac’s files.

Reading Apple support pages I understand it should work like this keeping everything separated in 2 different desktop folders, but I’ve read on Apple’s support forum that some people had the problem of iCloud merging the desktops.

So what will happen when I turn on iCloud Drive in my home macbook? Will it merge both desktop files, or will each Macbook keep it’s independent desktop files?

Thanks!

 

[Brookzy]

What will happen is that the second Mac's desktop will be placed in its own folder.

So in the Desktop folder there will be all of your work MacBook's files as usual, and a new folder called 'Home MacBook's Desktop' (or whatever it is names as).

If you want you can then manually merge them by dragging all the contents of 'Home MacBook's Desktop' into the main Desktop folder, or you can just leave it separated.

iCloud won't merge them automatically.

 

[diegovega]

Great thanks for confirming.

 

[numanbeing]

Unlike the original poster, I DO want files in my desktop folders to be merged all the time across multiple macs and I dont want to have to keep track of which mac has the latest.

Is there any way to achieve this so that desktops stay in sync persistently. I've achieved this with dropbox and symlinks but would like to move to iCloud

 

[370zulu]

Unlike the original poster, I DO want files in my desktop folders to be merged all the time across multiple macs and I dont want to have to keep track of which mac has the latest.

Is there any way to achieve this so that desktops stay in sync persistently. I've achieved this with dropbox and symlinks but would like to move to iCloud

I think I recall doing this very thing. First - have a solid backup before making any changes. If you have that, good. If not, I strongly encourage it.

All that said, I believe that I did exactly as @Brookzy said above.

"If you want you can then manually merge them by dragging all the contents of 'Home MacBook's Desktop' into the main Desktop folder, or you can just leave it separated."