Like others here, I have been migrating one user account forward since the dawn of OS X, so I had lots of "Fetching" in Mavericks. I don't know how I didn't notice it earlier.
It turns out this is easy to fix, assuming that you know how to use ls, chown, and chgrp and have a little time to burn.
I've seen a lot of commentary about using utilities (Apple's and otherwise) to fix this and about making sure that your user account belongs to the correct group (staff). I'll attempt to boil this down to what little has to occur to make this work, without regard to exact steps.
1. Be sure your user account is a member of group "staff."
2. Set your home directory and all of its contents to group "staff" by using: chgrp -R staff /Users/Username
3. Using chmod, set your Home folder 755. Then using -R option, set all its subfolders to 700, with exception of the Public folder and (if you have retained one) the Sites folder... Public folder is 755, and the Drop Box in it is 733.
Comments on those points, by number:
1. I found this to be a distraction and waste of time, because the migration assistant had already done a good job of assigning my account to staff, so there was nothing to fix here. I'm guessing that step 1 has been a potentially confusing distraction for many here, because it's already done and does nothing to fix the actual problem, which is the fact that on older accounts all the home contents will have the GID set to match the UID. As in my case, ls -n showed that group for all my stuff was still set to 501.
2. Where this might seem counterintuitive is if you are looking at permissions in the Finder's Info window. Forget using the Info window, other than to verify that "Fetching" is gone once you're done. It omits so much as to be confusing... By default, as far as I can tell (using ls -l and ls -n on a freshly created Admin account for reference) every single thing in the home directory has staff as a group, even if staff does not appear in the Finder's Info window. The reason being that the Finder Info window will only display the group name if the file has a permission that allows the group to actually use it. Example: If your Music folder has a permission of 700 (rwx------) and a group of staff, Finder Info will omit staff simply because staff does not have enough permission to do anything with it. To test this, you can take any folder that is currently a 700 permission with group of staff, and open the Info window on it to verify that staff is missing; then with the Info window still open change the permission to 750, and you will see staff pop up in the Info window almost instantly.
Easybourne
Level 1
(110 points)
