Recover lost Desktop icons
Q In Monterey, my Mac occasionally loses all the icons on its Desktop, forcing me to restart it. What’s going wrong and how do I fix it? bySTANWHITTLE
Although this has been not A uncommon in the past, it’s now an unusual problem. It’s worth starting up in Recovery mode with the ⌘ and R keys held, opening Disk Utility there, and running First Aid on that Data volume to ensure it’s healthy and make any necessary repairs.
Once you’ve done that, start up with the ⇧ key held to enter Safe mode. Leave your Mac a couple of minutes, then restart back into normal mode.
If this recurs after that, you shouldn’t have to restart your Mac to restore those icons to its Desktop. Instead, try opening the Desktop folder in the Finder, which forces it to be refreshed. If that doesn’t work, try forcing the Finder to restart, and if all else fails, log out and then back in again, which is faster than a full restart and should reload the Finder, your Desktop folder and all its icons properly.