NAS Access in Catalina issues

I can confirm the same issue with MacOS Catalina Finder connecting to Synology NAS. I found that the best but still crazy workaround is Finder force quit. I hope Apple and Synology teams are working on it.

Funny thing is I'm even having this problem in 10.14.6 with some of my users. One thing that seems to make sense to me is it seems to be something with the finder, it _may_ have something to do with keychain credentials, and also I wonder if it has something to do with doing Time Machine backups AND finder server connections at the same time. One other user posted that awhile back. Are most people here doing both? I am going to test tomorrow with some of my users to turn off (remove) the time machine connection for a bit to see if it helps.

Have any of you tried "factory-defaulting" your NAS device itself? (WD NAS, EX4 specifically, even has an option to perform this in a non-data destructive manner.) I believe it solved at least one of my issues with Catalina.

Just sharing....

Peripheral-device compatibility is a two-way street. As long as both sides agree to tighten-up their adherence to the "standards" at the same pace, we mere-mortals go about life none the wiser. When one side or the other, decides for whatever reason, that it is time to quit fooling around and finally bring their widget fully up to an existing (or new) standard, users experience pain. And the finger-pointing war begins!

Have any of you actually challenged-up the food-chain with your NAS manufacturer, past the Tier One support person? If their product is truly innocent, someone there can/will tell you exactly what the offending OS did to cause your pain. Of course, this may be exactly what management (usually, this will be Marketing) agrees to share.

I have felt your pain! (Just not right now.)

OM2

It goes deeper than simply this Jamsbe.

I've just gone through and ensured that SMB1 is completely blocked on my desktop, rebooted it and to the surprise of no one with the issue. I still can't connect to it without relaunching Finder.

The changes to Catalina have intrinsically broken SMB file sharing seemingly under some circumstances.

After my last post, I was sitting in bed thinking about the differences between my MacBook and iMac. Similar year, same software, same NAS - in fact two different NAS's, both work on the MacBook but on the iMac. Same network, router, etc. However, they do connect differently. Wireless MacBook vs ethernet on iMac. On the iMac, I deleted all my NAS keys in the keychain, cleared the server connections, disconnected the NAS and deleted the server in Time Machine, then rebooted everything. Still connected to ethernet, connected to the NAS, add the drive to TM, started a backup and... TM on the iMac failed as usual with "backup disk unavailable". I repeated the same process BUT pulled the cat5 on the iMac before rebooting. Time Machine started backing up, first time since November or whenever Catalina came out. Crazy. I am using a Netgear Nighthawk X6 8000 as my main router and various other Netgear routers in my home network. The iMac and NAS are plugged directly into the same switch, however the WIFI I connected to with the iMac is off a different smaller router, but still plugged into the same switch. I have no doubt this is a Mac OS issue, since my backup worked fine for years until Catalina - however I now believe it has something to do with how Catalina looks at the physical network interface. Nothing worked for me, I have tried every single option over the past several months listed on this board and Synology. I have SMB 3 and 2 large along with AFP enabled currently. I will disconnect some of the routers in my network and see if that makes a difference. Hope this helps someone.

And, please, don’t underestimate the importance of raising tickets with your NAS vendor support. They need to understand that their users do have this issue.

Only then the NAS vendors could play an important role in getting Apple to finally fix this Finder issue.

For me the problem is with a Netgear Readynas 516 and I can confirm the behaviour for these drives as well, so problem with SMB and AFP and the workaround indeed always works but normal finder behaviour would be nice. I hope many of us join the Big Sur beta program and check and submit bug reports for the NAS connection

Every day I check for a macOS update for Catalina hoping that this will be fixed. There were a few updates and now on macOS Catalina 10.15.6 I can get a connection, but cannot copy very much data to the Synology without a connection disconnect failure. This is really ruining my scheduled ChronoSync backups. After the connection disconnect Finder is unstable and I do need to quit all applications and attempt to reboot the Mac... I can't always get a clean reboot because of the instability.

I just found a temporary workaround for data transfer. I have a Parallels Windows VM and inside of it I am currently using Windows explorer to drag and copy a 319 GB bulk copy... a very large block of data. I'm about about and hour and a half into it with 7 hours to go. I hope this works because I feel like I'm walking a tightrope without a net. I'll report back when I know if it really worked.

Consider ensuring that your NAS transmits the bonjour credentials under whichever you choose of AFP or SMB

I’ve also gotten the question mark before, and I am not sure in which circumstances. But not getting it now after dragging the shared folder from the mounted drive on desktop.

I do not know what made you suspect Norton.

We do not use Norton but same issue wth tm.

Please see this thread here:

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251642388?answerId=253219396022#253219396022

Do you mean update from 10.15.5 to 10.15.6 or Big Sur (public beta) ?

Please see this thread here :

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/251642388?answerId=253219396022#253219396022

@VikingOSX, I am not a pristine Mac user but a Unix and macOS veteran. I had this working just the way you said since at least 10.5. But it stopped working shortly after I upgraded from to 10.15.1 (or maybe 10.15 but I did not really noticed or kept track at the time). I did not remember having this issue in 10.15 beta 7 (but maybe it was there unnoticed).

This is happing on a MacBook Pro 13" TouchBar 2018 shipped by Apple with Mojave and that I upgrade to 10.15. Nothing else has changed in my environment and yet I am seeing this issue. Obviously, something must be different between our 2 configurations if you are not seeing this; but trust me, the problem does exist.

Others are seeing this too and for no apparent reason:

• https://community.synology.com/enu/forum/1/post/129160?page=1&sort=oldest
• https://mariushosting.com/connection-problem-between-synology-nas-and-macos-catalina/

My NAS even no longer appears in the Finder sidebar since I've cleared the ARP table; and my MacBook Pro keeps trying to connect to my wife's MacBook Pro (still under Mojave fortunately) and popping up a connection dialog every 30 seconds (which disappears almost immediately), also since I've cleared the ARP table. And yes, I've rebooted!

As a system developer, this feels like something maybe small but fundamental has changed in the internals of macOS and it's starting to surface and it does not look pretty. I will file a radar shortly.

Same problem here. Very frustrating. I found restarting Finder to work, but that's not practical to do constantly, nor do I know if it will work every time. I hope Apple and Synology can get this working again.

The Finder Window's Connect As… pop-up works for me in Catalina 10.15.1 with my Synology NAS, though I am a version behind in my DiskStation management software due to the age of the NAS hardware. There is no ruling out changes in Catalina, or changes in the current DSM software release for others with newer Synology NAS hardware. Even a slow failing NAS drive can give one considerable aggravation…