Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today let me explain why there maybe a Relocated
Items folder on your Desktop after updating macOS.
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So after a macOS update you may find this folder here on your Desktop.
It's called Relocated Items. A very common question is
what is it and can I delete it. The short answer is Yes, you can delete it.
The first thing I want you to notice is that this isn't a folder on your Desktop. This is
an alias. Notice the little arrow here at the bottom left hand corner of the folder
telling you that the folder really isn't located there. It's somewhere else. If we were to Control
Click on it and Show Original we would see that it's actually located in your Shared folder. So
your User Shared Folder. So if you were to delete this alias the Relocated Items folder doesn't
go anywhere. So if you're afraid of deleting something that you may need, you're not actually
deleting it by getting it off your Desktop. So the quick and easy thing to do is just
remove it. Put if into the Trash and forget about it. Chances are you probably
never look in the Shared folder so having these things in there won't bother you. Let me tell you
the files in there are tiny. They are not going to take up any space on your drive.
What actually is inside here. Well, what you see may vary but most likely it looks just like what
I've got. You've got a folder here and you have a pdf called What are relocated items. Let's take a
look at that pdf. It explains what these are but it's using a lot of technical jargon. Basically
what it says is these are configuration files. These are files that are part of your system
that are different than what's being installed during the update. So the old copies being saved.
Now why are they different? It says here these are modified or customized by you
or another user. Now if you haven't modified any configuration files, and chances are you haven't,
and there's nobody else using your Mac that would do that and it wasn't you. It also says
by another app. Now if you've installed an app that has for some reason modified your
system configuration file it's probably best to have the update replaced those. If the app
you're using needs to change the configuration file again it should be smart enough to do so.
But, more likely what this actually means is that a configuration file in your old version
of macOS is different than in the new version that you installed. It wasn't you or an app that
changed it. It's simply different now from the old version to the new version. But the system update,
for some reason, isn't smart enough to know that. It just sees that it's different and it thinks,
well maybe you changed it. I probably shouldn't delete this so I'm going to Save a copy of it
just in case. So it's just the difference between an old configuration file and a new one included
with the update. It isn't anything you did or an app you installed did. It's basically the macOS
update being a little persnickety, and making sure there's a copy of this changed file.
So what is this file? Well, let's look under Configuration here and you could see there's a
folder called Private, a file called Etc., and then one called Group System Default. So this
isn't something you would normally modify or an app would normally modify. There's just a slight
difference between the old group system default and the new one. So the old one has been saved.
But you don't need the old one. Notice that the file size is minuscule. In fact the pdf telling
you about this is many times bigger than the actual file that's being saved. So the simple
thing to do is just drag this to the Trash and forget about it. But if you really want
you can go in the Finder to the computer level to the hard drive, Users, Shared and you could find
that folder and maybe any previous ones that you haven't dealt with there and you can delete
them. They really don't take up any space so you don't even need to worry about them.
Apple has a support document about this online and it has a really long URL so it's just much
easier to type Apple relocated items into Goggle. It's the first hit. Then you come to this simple
explanation there. But there's really is no extra information here that isn't in the pdf.
Hope you found this useful. Thanks for watching.