Why does DS_Store prevent copying?

Really ? . . . why is this still a problem ?

10.9.3 and I still get errors due to .files

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!

I wanted to let you know that I tried this today. I started a copy with both volumes in column view and by the time I got back from work, 1.17TB had successfully copied without a .ds_store error.

I'll keep using this method for copies large and small which usually occur between a bare drive mounted with a Voyager Q dock, a DroboPro connected via iSCSI and a different DroboPro connected via FW800.

John

That's certainly interesting, and good info.

However, it's useless for me, and probably for most other users. I find columns view worthless, as I need to see details about my data. I'd have to temporarily switch every single folder & sub-folder on my source drive to columns view, before copying, which would literally take hours of tedious work, then change them back again afterwards.

- And worse, if you missed one, it would be very hard to figure out which folder didn't fully copy, which is the worst thing about this whole mess.

Well, maybe this is a decent quick-fix when you're just copying one small folder.

Actually the only thing that needs to be in column view is the target Finder window. This works when copying the root folder to another Finder window with multiple sub-folders so I don't know why you would need to switch each source folder to column view.

I'm with you on needing details, but when I go to actually just do the copy from one place to another (here I'm backing up data from my drobo to a bare drive), I switch to column view right before I start the copy. Then I close both windows and let it chunk away for a few hours. My ordinary view is list view, I just do the copy from columns. Hopefully that clarifies it a little. I'll post again when I have a problem doing it this way.

Thanks for the clarification, guys.

I just did a test run using Big John's method, and so far so good. It was only a smallish file, with only a few subfolders, but there were no hangs at all.

You still have to wonder how Apple could possibly not be addressing this problem. It just blows my mind. Maybe they did it on purpose, trying to force everyone to use a cloud service. I seriously wouldn't be surprised if that were the case.

It would be interesting if they had a cloud service where I could store the 30TB of data I have. Of course, i'd need true gigabit internet service to get it there. i'm not much of a disk format guy - perhaps ZFS would be more appropriate but it seems to be a dead issue at Apple for now.

Thank you for posting this solution. I have been bothered by these .DS_Store files for months and have not found a solution. My work around has been to copy large files by breaking them down into the individual folders and copying the folders one by one. This enables the copy process to be done, but it is time consuming.

I just tried putting everything in column view and repeated the copy process. I successfully copied a 450 GB file without the .DS_Store files halting the copying. Before trying your solution, I attempted to copy this same 450 GB file and was not able to complete the copying due to a .DS_Store file halting the copy process.

Good going! And thanks for sharing your solution!!!

As a workaround, if you just want to copy a big folder or two, I've found _any_ method other than a finder drag will avoid certain problems. There's Pathfinder at one extreme (or DoubleCommander), Carbon Copy Cloner to sync large folders to other drives or... just a UNIX "cp" command like "cp -r ~/Movies /Volumes/bigdrive/Movies/".

I discovered this from a USB 3.0 issue where the finder was hanging with a disk I/O error or some sort of "power state" change error, to the point where a system reboot was the only thing that would restart the finder. I'm getting the idea the Finder is just not Apple's finest piece of software. I got my first DS_Store already exists after upgrading to the current latest & greatest 10.9.4. Very not impressive.

We had the permissions checked, kept deleting everything from the drive AND emptying the trash. Finally, after giving EVERY USER permission to read/write, it worked (p.s., we were working on our main computer which we used to initialize the drive we first purchased it-WD "MyPassport for Mac USB 3.0"

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