Documents is missing from my sidebar
The Documents folder in my Finder’s sidebar suddenly disappeared. It’s still selected in Finder’s preferences, and I’ve restarted my Mac. How can I put the folder back in the sidebar?
[ SHERI WOOD ]
Howard Oakley replies: First check that your Documents folder is still where it should be: switch to Finder and then press ‘Shift-Cmd-H’. If it has been moved or renamed somehow, you’ll need to put it back at the top level of your Home folder and correct its name. Or if you’ve used Sierra’s option of putting the Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud Drive, in which case, the two folders should be at the top level of that instead. This whole problem may have arisen because the file that contains Finder’s preferences has become corrupted. Switch to Finder, hold Option and choose ‘Go > Library’, and then look in the Preferences folder there for a file named ‘com.apple.finder.plist’ — move it to another location, perhaps inside your Documents folder, then log out of your user account and back in again, or restart your Mac. Afterwards, you’ll need to set up all of your Finder preferences from scratch, but you may find the Documents folder appears properly in the sidebar again. One final trick which may be worth trying is starting up in Safe mode (see bit.
ly/2kZIUFq). This flushes many system caches, and if nothing else has helped, it may get the Finder’s sidebar working properly again.