I was AirDropping around two gigabytes of video from an iPad Pro (4th gen, 11’) running iPadOS 26.2.1 to a Mac Mini (2020, M1) running macOS 15.7.7 (recently updated from an earlier macOS 15 minor version, 15.2 maybe?) and it all seemed to work, including the iPad reporting a successful AirDrop and it took it’s time, with the progress bar behaving like it would on a working AirDrop. I have no backup of these and I deleted them from the iPad for storage reasons, and cleared my recently deleted in Settings under Storage. I found this ask different question and while they described the same phenomenon, neither the accepted answer nor the other one was of any help to me. I also found this (blog post?) which was also of no help to me. Both devices were on the same Apple ID and the AirDrop was accepted automatically because of that. I also checked my Photos on the mac, which had one photo I put there earlier today.
ls also claimed that the files were 0 bytes in size.
My system is otherwise totally fine, just half a week’s work in video was lost. Since the AirDrop which didn’t work I have made several facetime calls and successfully received another 900mb of video files, which you can see in the image. There are also a bunch of video files with the same naming scheme from some time ago I transferred in the same way which worked totally fine.
