Jon Levinson

Q: why folders disappear from finder sidebar in mavericks?

Why do, for no apparent reason, the folders I have added to the Finder's sidebar just disappear when I open a Finder window?

Posted on Nov 13, 2013 7:53 AM

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Q: why folders disappear from finder sidebar in mavericks?

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  • by Woop,

    Woop Woop Apr 12, 2014 8:25 AM in response to David Bregande
    Level 1 (40 points)
    Apr 12, 2014 8:25 AM in response to David Bregande

    No, it's not user error.

  • by Woop,

    Woop Woop Apr 12, 2014 8:43 AM in response to Jon Levinson
    Level 1 (40 points)
    Apr 12, 2014 8:43 AM in response to Jon Levinson

    I'd sure like to see a fix.

     

    I made an alias and dragged it to the Taskbar next to the Trash. Hopefully that won't disappear, too.

  • by NDchemE,

    NDchemE NDchemE Apr 12, 2014 8:46 AM in response to Woop
    Level 1 (14 points)
    Mac OS X
    Apr 12, 2014 8:46 AM in response to Woop

    I tried that too. My aliases disappeared.

  • by Eric Root,

    Eric Root Eric Root Apr 12, 2014 12:45 PM in response to Woop
    Level 9 (69,976 points)
    iTunes
    Apr 12, 2014 12:45 PM in response to Woop

    Apple doesn’t routinely monitor the discussions.

     

    Send Apple feedback. They won't answer, but at least will know there is a problem. If enough people send feedback, it may get the problem solved sooner.

     

    Feedback

  • by Avi iPhone5,

    Avi iPhone5 Avi iPhone5 Apr 26, 2014 7:15 AM in response to Jon Levinson
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 26, 2014 7:15 AM in response to Jon Levinson

    Someone mentioned on another post about the same problem, that it may be related to the type of volumes the mac is connected to, and when you have a mix of AFP and SMB connections there seems to be a bug that removes the favorites or reset the plist files. I'm not sure yet and haven't research enough. this looks to me like a bug in the OS as I haven't seen this happening on 10.8 and 10.7 on any of the mac I support (about 50 macs in a small company with a mix of AFP and SMB shares running in the back). I suggest we try to pin point the problem to help Apple resolve this (as much as it's not our job). Thanks guys.

  • by Erick Mikiten,

    Erick Mikiten Erick Mikiten Apr 28, 2014 8:30 AM in response to Avi iPhone5
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Apr 28, 2014 8:30 AM in response to Avi iPhone5

    Avi, are all your machines Macs?

     

    I've got 4 Macs in our office. two on Snow Leopard and two on Mavericks. We also have a Windows Print Server that was installed and is maintained by a reprographics company, so I have no info on it.

     

    We connect to the windows machine to grab PDF scans we make on our printer and wide-format plotter. It often disappears from the sidebar, with about the same frequency that our Mac folders disappear.

     

    All the Mac folders that disappear are living on our Mac Mini that's on Snow Leopard and acting as our file server.

     

    I'm suspcious of the Snow Leopard and Mavericks mix. Are all your Macs on one OS?

  • by Avi iPhone5,

    Avi iPhone5 Avi iPhone5 Apr 28, 2014 10:38 AM in response to Erick Mikiten
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 28, 2014 10:38 AM in response to Erick Mikiten

    Hi Erick,

     

    We have mostly Macs in the office (about 50 machines) running 10.7.5, 10.8.5 and 10.9.2. Some Macs run Windows virtual machines that are connected to the same back end servers.

     

    We have Windows and Mac servers in the back which offer both AFP (on the Macs and some of the Windows servers) and SMB (on the other Windows servers) services and I have only seen the problem with the favorites disappearing on the Mavericks machines. The other Lion and Mountain Lion machines are all fine.

     

    I'm about to do some research and try to reproduce the problem, as currently the users report random behavior and no specific pattern on when the favorites disappear.

     

    I'll send updates if and when I have them. Any additional info about this would help, if you come across.

     

    Thanks!

  • by Erick Mikiten,

    Erick Mikiten Erick Mikiten Apr 28, 2014 11:00 AM in response to Avi iPhone5
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Apr 28, 2014 11:00 AM in response to Avi iPhone5

    Avi, more info on our end:

     

    - We also see no problem on our machines running 10.8.5.

     

    - My MBP (10.9.2) is the biggest problem, with some favorites disappearing every week, and ALL of them disappearing occasionally. Some details with the MBP that may spark something for you:

     

    1. There's pretty clearly some sequence of events whereby I'm getting on my home network at night (wireless), and then losing favorites when I reconnect to our work network (wired and wireless).

     

    2. If I start clicking on favorites before I mount our file server in the morning (not only when I've been on my home network the night before), sometimes they will mount the file server, and sometimes the favorites blink out of existence.

     

    3. After clicking on a favorite and it disappears, I can mount the file server (by clicking its folder in my Dock), and then the other favorites are fine.

     

    4. Any folders or files in my Dock, pointing to the file server, are ALWAYS fine.

     

    These tidbits seem like they should be helpful, but I've spent hours with tech support, and none of it helped them to help me.

     

    Would love to hear from others about their setups.

  • by kman527,

    kman527 kman527 Apr 30, 2014 2:00 PM in response to Erick Mikiten
    Level 1 (0 points)
    Apr 30, 2014 2:00 PM in response to Erick Mikiten

    I have spent many frustrating hours talking with Applecare for the last six months, There is no indication that there is any fix. The last answer I received was they were "Investigating it."

     

    My setup is much like Erick's.

     

    MBP running 10.9.2

    MacMini running 10.6.8

    NEVER had any problem with any previous version of OSX.

     

    Latest comment I received from Greg (an extremely knowledgable and helpful guy) at  CityMac in Traverse City MI was that there might be some conflicts between SMB and AFP protocols. On my Mini I have the sharepoints set up to allow both protocols. He suggested I run a test with AFP only and SMB only. I have not had a chance to do this but one would think that the Apple engineers would have tried it in the last six months.

     

    As a former software developer it particularly galling because this just does not seem like that difficult a problem.

     

    During my last regular monthly call I was told that the engineer wanted a Quicktime screen capture of the event. Cannot imagine that would be any help. Sort of like a camera watching a light bulb until it burns out never to come on again.

     

    I have sent them about 3 or 4 data dumps that I captured right after it happened but that did not result in any progress.

     

    Sigh...

  • by Erick Mikiten,

    Erick Mikiten Erick Mikiten Apr 30, 2014 2:59 PM in response to kman527
    Level 1 (25 points)
    Apr 30, 2014 2:59 PM in response to kman527

    Kman, I've also sent multiple data dumps. I don't think that's where they need to be looking.

     

    Have not investigated changing the protocols, but am upgrading to Mavericks on the suspect File Server this afternoon. WIll update the chain here if there's any change.

     

    If I want to change protocols, where is that found? I don't see anything obvious in System Preferences, except that the computer computer can found on the networks at AFP blahblah.

  • by mtooster,

    mtooster mtooster May 2, 2014 11:18 AM in response to Erick Mikiten
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 2, 2014 11:18 AM in response to Erick Mikiten

    I have got the same problem.

    I have a shared folder called Groups on my 10.8 server.

    I have some subfolders of that share in my favourites, and they disappear quite often. (mostly when I reboot when not at the office)

     

    I now try to use Connect to... (CMD-K) to connect to the subfolder directly (using addres like afp://10.0.x.x/Groups/foldername) and drag that mount to my sidebar favourites.

     

    Will report back if that works.

  • by David Lawless,

    David Lawless David Lawless May 7, 2014 7:48 PM in response to Jon Levinson
    Level 1 (20 points)
    May 7, 2014 7:48 PM in response to Jon Levinson

    I'm having a problem with individual folders in the favorites sidebar diappearing also... Although in our case, it's only happening with folders on our Windows Server (our Mac server is mounted automatically at login). I'm going to add our Windows servers share to the auto-login and see if that resolves the issue.

     

    I'm also receiving an error message when opening Excel and Word files stored on our Windows Server. I get an "application can not be found" error, even when the app is open on the Mac. Don't know if these issues are related.

  • by its.me,

    its.me its.me May 14, 2014 7:23 AM in response to Jon Levinson
    Level 1 (0 points)
    May 14, 2014 7:23 AM in response to Jon Levinson

    After I have seen many posts here describing the disappearing folder from favorites issue, I would just like to add that this not only happens with shared folders from other machines/servers but also for folders that you share from your local mavericks machine. In my case i have several folders in favorites and have a couple of them disappearing from time to time. These folders are automatically shared using dropbox and droplink. I am also using forklift as alternative file manager, and have never noticed the same issue there.

  • by Erick Mikiten,

    Erick Mikiten Erick Mikiten May 14, 2014 1:06 PM in response to its.me
    Level 1 (25 points)
    May 14, 2014 1:06 PM in response to its.me

    Sadly, even though our file server is now on Mavericks, we're still having the sidebar shared folders disappear.

     

    Most of the time it's when I click on a folder BEFORE having mounted the server from my MBP, after having been on my home network the previous evening. When it happens I can click, click, click, and make them all disappear in succession. As soon as I mount the file server the behavior stops.

     

    Today I opened up my MBP and found ALL my shared folders gone - about 12 of them - before clicking anything.

     

    I've spoken with Support about this a few times, and was referred to Enterprise Support for the next call.

     

    I'll update here if I get anything informative from them.

  • by Marvin Price1,

    Marvin Price1 Marvin Price1 May 20, 2014 6:52 AM in response to Jon Levinson
    Level 1 (10 points)
    May 20, 2014 6:52 AM in response to Jon Levinson

    Add me to the list.

     

    I've got a client, small office - about 20 machines, all brand new iMacs, all running 10.9.2 and some people have this problem but not all people have the problem. I just updated the most chronic person to 10.9.3 and the problem persists. I've tried forcing the Finder to regenerate the sidebars plist file, joy, problem persists. As others have indicated, this is only related to shared volumes.

     

    I've had the problem with both AFP and SMB shares. SMB has been so problematic that I've been forcing users to log in via AFP.

     

     

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