Can't add favorites in finder sidebar

I had the same problem, Favorites wasn't shown in finder windows, and when attempting to select the checkboxes in Preferences, they would only flash checked for an instant before becoming unchecked again.

Relaunching finder and restarting the machine, then relaunching finder again did not fix it.

Based on gbipot's suggestion to do it twice, I relaunched it two times in succesion. Back to normal now!

An easy way to relaunch finder is to hold the option key down while you right-click the finder icon in your dock. The option to "relaunch" should be one of the menu items.

Very weird bug!

-Ryan

Any other ideas? Still not working for me.

I also had the missing Favorites problem. It happened immediately after installing the Google Drive app.

The suggestion to Force Quit and restart the Finder worked for me.

death.ray

Wow, if it'd been a snake it would have bitten me. In my defense, I did discover this accidentally though. See attached screenshot.

Caveat: Running Mountain Lion 10.8.3

worked like a magic with me 😁 Thanks a lot~~

I was able to solve similar problem.

Issue:

I could not add one specific folder Movies. Nothing worked for me: tried force relaunch, delete plist files, all kinds of drag'n'drop, check box in Finder preferences.

Solution:

Apparently there was an issue with permissions. So 1) in terminal I became root (sudo su) and 2) moved folder to a safe place (used mc manager - no terminal commands here, sorry guys). it will be handy later. 3) create new folder with same name in old place as user ( NOT ROOT! - to create it with user permissions) 4) copied files .DS_Store and .localized from from backup to the newly created folder 5) force relaunch Finder 6) PROFIT

Now MacOS considers it system folder, but dragging and check box in Preferences work fine

Thank you!

Was having the same problem. As someone has suggested, Apple Menu | Force Quit | Finder | Relaunch did the trick for me.

I have a related problem. While I am able to add favorites (to use as shortcuts) to the sidebar (for folders I am currently working on), when I go to sleep or shut down, it removes some of the favorite. In other words, when the machine starts back up, the favorite is missing.

I'm noticing that this is only a problem for favorites that are not on one of the internal Mac drives. So shortcuts to folders that are part of the Mac itself reappear, but folders I've added as shortcuts for folders on my external drive are NOT reappearing as shortcuts in the Favorites Bar even though that external drive is on and operating. So, I'm having to re-add them each session. This seems to be af fairly recent problem, I've used shortcuts/alias/favorites and years and I don't remember ever having to re-add them repeatedly like now.

death.ray solution worked for me.

My question is, is this a bug in finder? I can't remember doing anything that made the "favorites" disappear and suddenly the check boxes in the preference can't be enabled while I can with "share" and "devices". Weird.

death.ray's solution worked for me as well.

But why did this happen ? Some problem with my system ? Can this happen again ?😕

Thank you so much, gbipot. My Favorites disappeared from my Finder window sidebar after reinstalling Mountain Lion. I followed your advice.

1 - I force quit Finder

2 - I relaunched Finder and Favorites was back!

Thank you so much. Oh, the mysteries of OS X.

I should have said thank you to death.ray, who printed the idea in this forum. Anyway, thanks, your idea worked!

"1 - I force quit Finder

2 - I relaunched Finder and Favorites was back!"

Does not work for me. I upgraded to Mavericks and have been running it about a week without this problem. Did nothing and all favorites disappeared.

Any more ideas?