Why does DS_Store prevent copying?

"It is certainly an OS bug. It's a PITA!!! "

That's what I've been saying as well. CLEARLY an OS bug, and it's incredible that Apple hasn't addressed this yet.

I think you're right about sub-folders as well. When the transfer stops, it's always at the EXACT point of a sub-folder, never on an individual file.

I'm going to through something out on the table as an observation. This seems to only happen on one of my external drives, and OWC Firewire 3TB. It has exhibited other concerning issues like spontaneously ejecting. Often I have to use disk utility to repair the drive. The other day I started to try moving stuff from the drive to another again and ran into the same problem. Could it be an error specific to a drive? I don't have D to go deeper into diagnosing the problem drive but will be reformatting it and seeing if it behaves better afterwards.

Phil

I have a full drawer of different disks, any storage size and any physical size, rotating or solid, you name it.

I am experiencing this problem no matter what copies what onto what else.

And I have failed at isolating one reason for it.

I noticed it first in Mountain Lion, when trying to dupe an SD card from the MBPr15 built-in card reader onto a different one stuck in a USB adapter. Which I blamed at first, just to find out that it had no part in the failure.

I tried to copy the same SD card onto the internal HD, and when it failed, now I blamed the SD card, of course. After reformatting it, I re-installed OS X onto it, and tried once more. Just to see it fail again.

Fast forward one year and a half later: brand new MBPr, right out of the box. As in now.

Need to copy a ~500GB library onto it. It failes like the one machine before, saying "The operation can’t be completed because an item with the name “.DS_Store” already exists.".

I truly don't know why, and I can't say I have a solution.

But I started to use a specific method, though, that got rid of the problem.

Once for all, pronto, finito. It never fails, it does not dodge files, it does not delete them.

Maybe someone might find it useful, too?

I'm not proficient at command-line, don't remember enough basic commands to perform all file duties in there, but I know from experience that when something fails to deliver in the "windowed" world, you switch to the parallel, command-line universe, and it always works (because of .bash_history, yep), but it does.

Anyway, I have installed an OS X port of a file manager named Midnight Commander, or simply mc, that exists under Unix, DOS, Linux since the dawn of creation; mind me here, there might exist a thousand other file managers that do the trick, but I stuck with the only one I know, and it's been this one since I was young.

First: look up Midnight Commander for OS X, locate a repository from which you feel comfortable to download.

There's a developer that's made a .pkg installer that never let me down.

Now, from within a Terminal session I launch Midnight Commander as a super-user:

sudo mc

After entering my password (as an Administrator of my own machine), I now select whatever I need to copy, point to where I wanna copy it, hit F5, end of story, Roger and out.

It's not THE solution to a bug, or whatchawannacallit.

It just works, it's free, and it promotes a bit more awareness of the Terminal even to non-geeks users like me.

And, it comes in handy whenever I need to move these 400GB of audio files, which is once every so long or half.

I have got this problem with Snow Leopard and now I have got it with Mountain Lion. The issue appears with : 1) just duplicating the same folder on the internal disk (in the same location), 2) with copying to external disks WD and Lacie Rugged, and 3) with copying to CF card... In fact, at the beginning when I left copying a large amount of data over the night and I didn't realize that it has stopped somewhere; thus I lost quite some of the data at that point. Despite being super careful after that, I keep facing this problem... I would appreciate a solution, this is becoming quite annoying...

The fact that Apple still hasn't addressed this common & incredibly frustrating problem, tells us all we need to know about the new direction of the company.

"Oh, but look at our shiny new iPads!"

It's seriously time to start looking at Windows for all my work.

I got the 10.9.2 updates as well.

Still no luck transferrring files. It's unbelievable.

I see now that it's not a CORRUPTION problem: The OS constantly creates ds.store files, and when you try to copy a complex folder (with other folders and single files inside of it) the OS sees ds.store files on the source, thinks they are identical to the ones on the destination (they of course are NOT identical) and STOPS THE COPYING PROCESS.

I have recently started using the app "Cocktail" to bulk-erase ds.store files from my source drives, instead of OnyX, because Cocktail makes it a little easier. This seems to work, but you have to remember to do this every time, and JUST before you start dragging that folder. Otherwise, the OS starts putting more ds.store files everywhere, and you get the same problem again.

It's beyond words how Apple doesn't care about things like this. There is simply no way that they don't know about it.

Open Cocktail.

Click on "Files"

Click on "DS Store"

Drag a folder or a drive icon into the box.

That's it. it takes a few seconds. - but remember that you have to (literally) do thi to your source location JUST before copying stuff, even if you did it 5 minutes earlier. There's a huge flaw in the Mac finder that just continually creates more of these "DS" items, all with the exact same name.

Apple HAS to know about this, and obviously it's not important to them. The're too busy designing the iPad 17.

Another possible solution:

I just was reading about the app "TotalFinder," ($18) which also brings back colored labels. One of its claimed features is, quote:

"Stop creating .DS_Store litter."

That sounds promising, though having suffered with Mavericks for several months now, I think the best solution is to buy a Windows machine.

Thanks cableaddict !
Sorry for not figuring it out myself .

I'm a bit swamped at the moment [though backups still need to happen !!].

I am running an older version of totalfinder , and haven't paid to upgrade my license , so I can't see this feature you mention , however I can say that totalfinder is a MUST have for many other reasons , and has sped up my workflow huuugely . It really improves finder 110%.

I haven't upgraded to Mavericks yet , and I think I'll leave that .

I don't know if I would buy a windows machine yet, though .

Another solution somebody mentioned above , somebody using Parallels to run windows on their mac , and doing their backups using windows on their mac .

I use "VMWare fusion" app to do the same thing [run windows on my mac] , which is much better than "parallels" IMO .

[ There is also the freeware open-source "virtualbox" which does much the same thing . ]

.... and I can successfully backup my data using windows , with no "DS_Store" problems !

On top of that , getting "paragon NTFS" and "Paragon HFS+ [for windows]" allows you to read and write on both mac and win formatted drives on both O/S's.

So this is a work-around , but not one that should need to happen !

But yeah , if apples OS's start getting worse , "windows machines" might start looking more appealing , if THEY could make a decent OS [theirs are getting worse too] , though I still think Mac Mini's are very hard to beat on value for money , and I think at least apple can be relied on for their hardware to "just work" , and in general I love Macs OS far more than windows.... they just need to fix some of their stupid crap up .

I believe this "DS_Store" problem goes under the general , well-known problem of "FTFF" aka "Fix The F*****G Finder"

Yep.... certain Linux distros are beginning to look more and more appealing [which Mac OSX is based on anyway !!! And these distros are re-emulating OSX ] such as "Elementary OS Luna" , which I've just got a torrent of , or "Mint" .... and there is more and more major app support in linux now , specifically for me , creative media applications , nearly all of which can be ported using "wine".

I loved apple because everything used to "just work" : but this seems to be less and less a concern .

Especially when they ignore a basic issue like this .

Benway1 wrote:

[which Mac OSX is based on anyway !!! And these distros are re-emulating OSX ]

OS X is primarily based on Berkeley Software Distrubution (BSD) Unix and NeXTSTEP. NeXTSTEP was released in the late 80's and Linux was release in the early 90's.

The two OS's are similar because of their similarity to Unix, but neither was based on the other.

Ah ! Fair enough ! Shows what I know ! [not much , honestly / obviously ], but I appreciate the information.

I read a bit about your point , and while it's very bad form to cite wiki as a source , if we are to believe the article on Unix , it supports what you say.

"The most common version of Unix (bearing certification) is Apple's OSX while Linux is the most popular non-certified workalike."

Therefore : I take it all back.

Everyone should ignore my stupid rant / misinformation above .

Nevertheless , these sorts of basic operating problems / procedures should not be a problem ,

and this and various other strong reasons [such as "FTFF" primarily (FFS!!!) ] are making me think harder about ditching OSX in the future.

I really , really do hate-to-hate on MacOSX this way .....

but the reason why I've mostly liked it so far is because , in more ways than most other OSs , it has always "just worked" despite it's shortcomings .... but more and more there are a lot of areas where it is just not working in a straightforward and simple way for me .

I figured out a solution that is working for us! After finding out that a .ds_store file is a preference for how folders are sorted and organized, I realized that there is only one view in Finder that does not have any preference to how folders or files are viewed. The column view doesn't maintain anything other than alpha order. If we copied anything in list view or icon view we'd run into the issue. But in column view we've been copying terrabytes of data many folders deep without problem.

The reason I see is because as soon as a folder is accessed in another view that would maintain display preferences of the folders, like if they are expanded or not in list view, then Finder is creating a preference file for that folder. It's just my deductive reasoning but I'd love it if others could benefit from it. Please test it for yourself and report back. Thanks!