Disappearing Favorites in Finder sidebar under OS X 12.x

mongoosenyc wrote:

Periodically, items that I add to the Favorites section of the sidebar in Finder windows randomly disappear from the list. This isn't anything to do with the Show/Hide toggle that causes all the items in the list to be displayed or not. It's that some items that were added to the list abruptly vanish from the list. There seems to be no consistency to when it happens, or to which items disappear.

This question has been asked a number of times in these forums but never, as far as I can see, satisfactorily answered. One typical suggestion involves deleting Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist (or Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist) and relaunching Finder. I have found that this sometimes -- but not always -- helps for a little while, but it hasn't resolved the issue permanently for me.

plutil reports that the plist files are not corrupt (or at least that they're well-formed XML; there's no way to know whether the data they contain is actually meaningful to Finder). But if it is a plist corruption issue, it would be nice to know why the plist keeps getting corrupted.

I suspect this may be related to OS X 12.3; I've seen it happen much more frequently since upgrading to this version of Monterey.

I've also noticed that it sometimes seems to be associated with the Finder "losing sight of" the user's Documents folder: the Documents folder is visible in Finder, but clicking on it fails to display its contents. Relaunching Finder mostly takes care of that, but doesn't restore the missing items to the Favorites list.

Any suggestions for resolving this issue once and for all would be welcome.

Could be corrupt plist, delete the com.apple.finder.plist

Found here Finder>Go>Go to Folder copy and paste:

~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

Relaunch your Finder from the >Force Quit>Finder>Relaunch

rebuild your Side bar as you see fit and test your results