The sidebar in the Finder window. The left hand side where your hard drives, thumb drives and other devices are listed.
Oh, I see. When you open a window in the Finder. That’s why I was confused. The finder by itself is usually a blank desktop.
What are articles such as this talking about, then? How to move documents from icloud back to… - Apple Community
How to Disable iCloud Desktop & Documents on Mac
It looks to me like these are probably a result of people turning OFF iCloud synchronization, and not understanding the various options that are offered, one of which would be that you don’t want to keep a local copy on that machine.
Some of them appear to be official advice, and they all seem to be explaining a lengthly procedure required to get your files back on the drive if you want to turn it off. It would be an incredibly long procedure on my setup if it worked at all, as at the best of times I have an extremely slow connection. If there’s an option offered to keep a local copy that avoids all that, I’d think at least one of the articles (I’ve seen a batch more than the two I cited) would have mentioned that.
In any case, I don’t want to turn it on in the first place; which is why I want to know whether updating might automatically turn on iCloud. This may admittedly not be the best place to ask.
I’m not scared by iCloud. Because I’m going to keep ignoring it…
Just to be Olde Skoole, and a little bit paranoid, I keep a backup on an external hard drive. A manual backup… no clouds involved, no Time Machines.
I’ll keep doing that, no matter what OS I use, even if Apple promises to keep all my stuff on a server in their Spaceship.
I have been using iCloud synch for years. It does not remove your local files unless you tell it to. If you are determined to refuse to believe that, there’s not much more help I can offer.
OK; thanks for info. I still don’t want to use it.