I am unable to turn on File Sharing on my iMac running macOS Catalina.

You are amazing! That is great detective work and thank you for the confirmation. I spent all yesterday on tech support moving up the food chain. Stumped everyone. Has nothing to do with login items, permissions, full disk access, ...the file sharing service just does not check box "on". I can use the command line and launchctl to manually start the smb or apple file service, but authentication fails. I was about to wipe and re-install but it looks like doing so would be a waste of time. Greatly appreciate the work you've done. Thank you!

Hi Faith

I had the same problem, the Untickable File Sharing Box. I tried checking by setting up a test user account. the file sharing box was untickable in the test user as well. I too used up a lot of Apple's tech support line's time without any resolution to the problem.

After about six hours work and help from my son, we worked out that because my system includes an iMac with a remote SSD boot hard drive, which had not been upgraded to the latest version of Catalina, we could do a work around. By booting from the SSD, I am now able to have one Mac that is capable of file sharing.

It would be useful to know if Apple plan to fix the file sharing issue.

Thanks for your help.

Mark

Thank you thank you! This worked perfectly for me. I was able to get both services up and running and authentication properly resumed. I now have an external drive connected and doing time machine backups of all my family's laptops. Previously I'd just tried the smbd and authentication didn't turn on. Looks like turning on both got me moving. I have not tried clicking off the check mark "File Share".....3rd rule Ain't broke don't fix it.

Yeah I also spent a LOT of time with Apple support. They told me to wipe the drive and re-install from scratch, and NOT to use time machine recovery (set up as new machine) then manually move the files over. Another post stated that this did not work. I believe they mentioned that wiping and re-install worked until the latest security patch was included. Then file sharing broke again?

Editor1979's terminal sudo commands, worked for me. Thanks!

Relevant Info:

MacBook Air (13-Inch, Mid 2012)

Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7 (19H1922)

Processor 2Ghz Dual-Core Intel Core i7

Memory 8 GB 1600 MHz DDR3

Issue arose after erase and reinstall macOS in that MacBook Air, it must have downloaded the latest version with that 'Bug'.

This little mishaps Apple let happen on old model OS upgrades.

Add me to the list. Running the latest Catalina on a 2012 File server. Yes, this is my home file server and i cannot turn file sharing on. I turned it off and now when I check the box to turn it back on, nada. I did not make any configuration changes. I rebooted a million times, disconnected all external drives, etc etc etc. No matter what I try, it just won't turn on.

I just tried the command line options, manually enabled the file sharing related LaunchD items and it did seem to work. It makes zero sense that this stopped working through the GUI though. If there's no underlying unix problem, I wonder if it's just a sharing prefs file glitch that could have been solved by removing just the right preferences file.

Not so fast. It kinda worked, but now I'm not seeing all my shares. And the shares I do see, come up as empty. Did I mention this is my home file server? I would love to just downgrade it back to snow leopard, but unfortunately there are a few other tasks this machine does that won't work.

Check out the previous post by editor1979 regarding using terminal app to manually start the services via the command line. Worked like a freaking charm for me.

** one thing I've not seen posted and turned out to be important: Do NOT use the same single drive for Time Machine backups on the host computer and for "sharing". i.e. use two drive, one for Time Machine backups of the host computer, and a second drive on the host computer to share with other machines for them to use as Time Machine backups. Trying to get both to use the same Time Machine formatted drive apparently causes massive problems....though I've not seen it posted anywhere nor does the software warn.

So while your script worked to restart file sharing on my iMac Catalina 10.15.7 (19H2026), I couldn't access an external HD attached to my iMac from my iPhone, despite several reboots of both devices. I was able to access the HD before I upgraded to Catalina.

So, despite the checkbox for File Sharing now being checked, I still cannot access the hard drive from another Mac. I'm seeing that others are having the same problem. Problem not really solved. Sorry for the premature elation.

Launch Activity Monitor and search for smbd. If you don't see that, then SMB file sharing is not on. You might have to "tickle" your network to make sure the process is active. I have found that if I have not used any network services for a while smbd disappears, but if I use the network SMB service (mount a drive, move a file etc.) then it reappears. If you do that and still don't see smbd, then it is not running. Try running the SMB load command in Terminal again - if it thinks SMB is already loaded, it will tell you. Try unloading, wait several minutes, then load it again - also waiting several minutes for the process to fully start up. I learned yesterday, after hours of messing with this, that the Terminal commands are not instantaneous,

Hello, Bob!

Somewhat I had the same issues once

You may want to try enabling the file sharing options found in System Preferences.

Try searching "File Sharing" in the search bar and make sure it is enabled on both Macs.

Hope this helps!

(If I am not accurate, I apologise as I am starting out.)

I see.

Is it possible you can update it? Normally bugs like this use an update, and it doesn't have to be a new version just a checkup update. (Even a quick safari update sometimes does the trick!) You can do this in System Preferences.