Since I installed macOS Big Sur 11.1, I cannot see the usual folders in the left sidebar of Finder:
even though I have selected them in my preferences:
What is going wrong here and how do I fix it?
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Sign up to join this communityNext to "Favorites", if you hover over it, you should see an arrow you can click to expand the section. It must've been inadvertently clicked, since it's not new to Big Sur.
rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist; killall Finder
Note that this should reset to the defaults, but if it doesn't you'll need to delete it from macOS Recovery.