Why does DS_Store prevent copying?

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.

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"

OS X 10.8.5

2 x 2.66 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon

12GB 1333 MHz DDR3

Tool Shed Studios

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I believe I have found the solution!! Go to your destination folder and go to the "View / Show View Options" menu...When the little window pops up showing the view attributes of your destination folder, Make sure that "Calculate All Sizes" is UnChecked! (That's why it also works in Column View... no calculations are being performed while in Column View)... The destination folder is busy calculating the folder size as you are copying it and I'm assuming by doing that, it's trying to create brand new DS_Store files and attempting to write over the DS_Store files that already exist. Problem solved! You guys helped me solve it when somebody mentioned the Column View. Thanks!

I was having this issue. The status that seems to cause it is if I have requested Info on the folder being copied into, and have that window active. Doesn't seem to matter if I am copying all new data or copying over pre-existing files. With info open, I get the .DS_Store error. Close the info window and all is good.

Wow! Venshield – you lift a stone from my hearth. I have had this problem for years, using hours and more hours of copying and re-copying between disks because a transfer stopped with the dreaded "DS_Store file already exists..."

Thank you!!!!

Doesn't seem to asnwer the question when putting alternate hypotheses in place.

Why is this a problem under Mavericks, and never before?

I'm having the DS_store copying error and there's still no solution. Apple please address this incredibly annoying problem.