Finder stopped working after macOS 14 update

Steve626 thanks, I appreciate your thorough response and just wanted to ask if it is possible to change my external time machine drive to APFS format if it is already pretty full of data? Or do I have to wipe it and reformat again? How do I check what format my external drive is? Thanks in advance.

lisafromcanyonleigh wrote:

Steve626 thanks, I appreciate your thorough response and just wanted to ask if it is possible to change my external time machine drive to APFS format if it is already pretty full of data? Or do I have to wipe it and reformat again? How do I check what format my external drive is? Thanks in advance.

You can check the drive format by clicking once on it and selecting from the menu FILE => GET INFO

But if all you have is a Time Machine drive, I doubt that is the problem. iCloud Drive does not interact with Time Machine, although if you have partitioned the external physical drive into multiple volumes and one is used for your Documents or other storage in connection with iCloud Drive, that MIGHT be problematic. Based just on what I have read in these numerous postings.

Before doing anything to your Time Machine drive, just eject it and see if the problems have ceased.

If you decide you want to reformat the external drive, its misc storage contents need to be copied to another drive first. Otherwise they will be lost. As for the Time Machine backups, it is no longer possible to copy them to other drives and keep them usable. So for that, I would acquire a new Time Machine drive, start using that, Time Machine will alternate between the old one and the new one, and when you feel you have everything suitably backed up on the new one, you can safely reformat the old one.

But as I said, i believe the problems reported here seem to be correlated with use of external mechanical drives HFS+ format for miscellaneous storage (not Time Machine) that is connected to iCloud Drive. I have no idea why that might be unless Apple has somehow optimized the iCloud synchronization for APFS, or if that process is just very slow with external HFS+ mechanical drives.

I have HFS+ as well as APFS external drives used with Time Machine and both work fine with no issues. Normally new Time Machine drives are force-converted to APFS by the MacOS before the first Time Machine backup but if you have "inherited" an HFS+ formatted drive for Time Machine from an older computer, under some instances the MacOS will allow it to stay HFS+.

I don't know if this helps with your question. Before doing anything to a working Time Machine drive, I would eject it and observe whether this improves the Finder behavior. If it does not, the Time Machine drive is not the issue.

Steve626 thanks and I appreciate your explanation. I do have other data on the drive. But because I have retrofitted my new iMac with Ventura now and am not having any problems with my external drive or with iCloud, I think I will leave it setup as it is. I live in a rural area with limited satellite wifi. Changing systems take hours, and I just think “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” will have to suffice at this time. I have reported my problem to Apple Support, both in chat, and using the submit a bug field on their website. Hopefully eventually Apple will resolve the problem. I do feel that Apple should release operating systems that work universally with hard drive formats, and also with iCloud.

That's reasonable. I am wondering if your slow rural internet connection is somehow related to the slowdown as that would impact iCloud Drive sync. But sometime in the future you might consider upgrading all the external drives to be SSDs and APFS and then you might consider moving to the latest MacOS. But your setup sounds like it will work fine for quite a while.

Steve626, last year I bought a SanDisk Professional 2TB G-Drive ArmorATD - Rugged, Durable Portable External

Hard Drive HDD, USB-C, USB 3.2 Gen 1 - SDPH81G-002T-GBA1D hard drive. I would like to use it for TM backups with the new iMac I plan to buy. I was told that it would be formatted the first time I plug it in for the format that the OS requires. Considering your post about external drives, is there an issue with Sonoma (or something else) that would cause problems if I used this drive for TM?

That drive will work well for Time Machine, Sonoma or other lower versions of the MacOS. My only concern is that the Time Machine backup drive should be 4x to 5x or more larger than the drive it is backing up. The drive you specified is 2 TB, you might want a larger drive unless your internal drive is 500 GB or less.

Thank you very much, steve626. I didn't realize that the size could be a problem.

The internal storage on the old iMac is 1.12 TB with 826 GB available and the old external TM backup drive is 2 TB, with 875 GB available.

The new iMac will have 1 TB storage. If the San disk 2TB drive is not big enough for the new iMac, I will buy a new bigger harddisk. Any suggested model to avoid any potential issues with Sonoma?

Same issue happened after a forced upgrade from Monterey to Sonoma on a Mac mini 2018. Now, touching any Finder item – file, menu, whatever – brings up the spinning beach ball of death. It can take up to 30 seconds for that to stop.

Turning off iCloud drive did not fix the problem for me.

@Apple This is the most annoying bug ever in my more than 20 year history using Macs. Give it some love!!!

I’m really sorry to hear the problem still exists, which has been reported on this community stream since last year. I had the same issue and was forced to revert through a Time Machine backup of Ventura 13. I have had zero problems with Finder since reverting to Ventura. I think there are ways you can reinstall Ventura onto your Mac and if you follow the steps shown on the How To guides within Apple you should probably go back to Ventura too until it is announced Sonoma actually has fixed this.

Yesterday after an update to 14.4.1 my finder got stuck. So I turned off iCloud Drive, but when I want to turn it back on the setting menu gets stuck and doesn't include iCloud. That is on MacBook Pro Intel. Is it there any solution?

For the people who are not able to disable the iCloud Drive sync:

You need to go to Internet Accounts -> iCloud Drive -> turn off the toggle. It will ask if you want to keep a copy or not -> choose to keep a copy. It will start downloading, and you can just quit; you don't need to wait for it to finish. Boom, Finder will start working.

PS: If your iCloud page does not open, you may need to shut down your PC until it works. It worked for me on my third try.

Th3Cr0w: thanks for your detailed comment. I’ve been following this thread for months, since I encountered the problem early this year on a brand new 2023 21.5” iMac. Fortunately I’d made recent backups before I ceased using my earlier iMac. I made the decision to revert entirely to Ventura, because my new iMac does only have a 500GB internal storage and I really need my external 2TB drive for my large iPhoto Library. Since reverting to Ventura I have had zero hassles. I can use iCloud for calendar, contacts, & all those apps we need when travelling, and I can use my external drive for iPhoto and also for Time Machine. Problem solved. First time in my 40 years of using a Mac I’ve EVER had to revert to a previous system! Needless to say I’m not impressed.

Relaunching Finder has fixed this for me:

Option-click Finder in the Dock > Relaunch at the bottom

Safe mode does not help. Same issue in safe mode.

Please escalate this issue. It is also happening on M1 pro.