How to add Network Shares to Favourites in Finder

Hi,


I have a NAS drive where I have created various shares such as Public, Private, Movies, Music etc.

I can connect to and navigate to these shares and access the folders just fine from Finder.


The NAS drive also appears under Locations in Finder.


However, I cannot add any of the shares e.g. Music to the Favourites section of Finder.

  • When I try to drag, it won't drop.
  • If I click the File menu, the 'Add to sidebar' option is greyed out.


I can add a subdirectory of the share, e.g. if go into the Music share and select a folder e.g. '1990s' , I can drag and drop that to the Faves and the File menu also shows the 'Add to sidebar' option.


I am newbie migrating from Windows to MacOS and I know I can do the above in Windows Explorer so was expecting to be able to do the same in MacOS.

Thanks

MacBook Pro (M1, 2020)

Posted on May 15, 2024 4:01 AM

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5 replies

May 15, 2024 6:52 AM in response to harryw66

The ones with the humans are the mounted network shares. You can safely drag those to the trash, but it will unmount the shares.


Unfortunately, when using aliases, there is no easy way to segue their icons into network shares. They are and will remain two different artifacts. You can store them some other place. That's the easiest solution. You can put them in the Finder sidebar. At least they will be separate from the mounted shared that will also show in the sidebar.


There is a long list of other approaches. You could add the aliases as login items and they will mount the drives as soon as you login. The downside is that they will always be mounted that way. If that's what you want, then go for it.


There are also other options, like favourites in the Finder's Connect to server dialog. And there are some 3rd party apps that will help.


I should caution you that network shares really are a 30 year-old technology. They aren't well-supported anymore. You might experience some problems with network shares that you haven't encountered on Windows. These days, people use file sync services across the internet. So from time to time, it might seem like network file server support is some kind of brand new feature in macOS. In fact, it is. Modern Macs are nothing more than iPhones with displays, keyboards, and AC power. iPhones typically never connected to network servers. So then, the iPhone OS gets ported to the Mac, which didn't have great networking to being with, and it seems like the Mac doesn't know how to deal with this 30 year-old technology.


Years ago I would have recommended you use the built-in automounter. That would have done everything you expect. Apple used to have a support document for it dated 2009, but they took that down. The functionality is still there, but I don't know how well it works. The last time I tried it in 2016/2017, the auto mounting worked well enough, but Finder would regularly choke on image previews and would corrupt network documents. So that's where we are.

May 15, 2024 5:19 AM in response to etresoft

Thanks - that seems to work.

Although the initial Alias created was invalid, I had to select Fix Alias and then after that I could add the Alias to the Favourites.


Although, now I see the Shares duplicated on the left hand side of the desktop - is there anyway of removing those - or at least not duplicated?


The ones with the humans were already present and I am guessing they were just 'Recent' links to the shares.

However, when I created the Aliases the disk drive icons also started appearing.

If I delete the disk drive icons - will that delete the Aliases (or worse the files in the shares - eek!).


Apologies if these are dumb questions - I have only ever used Windows for the past 30ish years - only got this personal MacBook after I was given one at work - and I kinda liked it ;)

May 15, 2024 12:43 PM in response to etresoft

Thanks for the detailed reply.

Weird thing is tried moving the Aliases to a desktop folder to hide them and it broke the alias.

I then tried copying the human share icons from the desktop into the Finder sidebar just to test again and it started working! I now have the shares in the favourites! Hopefully they will stay there.


The reason I persist with the Network shares is that the rest of the family all use Windows and Android to store and access the files on the NAS and I have some scripts to backup everything to Backblaze.

How to add Network Shares to Favourites in Finder

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