Error message "The operation can't be completed because an item with the name .DS_Store already exists"

Another handy way to copy is with Terminal.app. Open up a Terminal window, and type in 'cp -r '. Charlie Papa space dash Roger space. Switch to Finder, and drag-n-drop your source folder into Terminal. Back to Finder, take your destination folder and drag that into the Terminal window. Press enter in Terminal to start the operation, and cp will silently go to work. It should only produce text as it comes up with problems, either mentioning that it skipped a problem or asking you for a y/n. If cp is still asking you too many questions about overwriting stuff, you might want to up your game with 'cp -rf ' instead.

The title bar of Terminal will have 'cp' in the name while copying, that will turn back to 'bash' when the copy is done. This is much more visible in Terminal's tabs, you might want to open a second tab(Cmd-T) just for that.

Have you gotten any info on solving this? I have the exact same problem. Trying for days to copy one 3TB drive to another.

Thanks

Also, you can try deleting these .DS_Store files? I would open a terminal and do the following:

$ sudo find /Volumes/VOLUME -name .DS*

Where VOLUME is going to be whatever external hardrive you have, this should show all those files, if you see that the list is accurate, then you can delete all of them by using:

$ sudo find /Volumes/VOLUME -name .DS* -exec rm {} \;

I was having a similar problem and this resolved it.

Hope it helps!

I'm having this same problem in Mavericks on a brand-new freshly formatted disk.

I tried the sudo commands suggested in the post above. I was able to sucessfully execute the operations, but it did not solve the problem for me.

Anyone have a solution to this?

Thanks!

I ended up completely reformatting the drive and retrying again. After the reformat I was able to copy over the folders that failed the first time. But now, now even 24 hours later I'm having the same problem.

This is clearly an Apple bug, but here's a quick and easy workaround that worked for me:

• I was trying to copy a big (800 GB) folder from one external drive to the root of another. It consistently failed with the above error message.
• My fix was simply to create a dummy folder in the root of the "To" drive and copy my big folder to that.
• After it ran (3 hours, no problems), all the files were successfully copied to the dummy folder, so I just dragged that to the root and deleted the dummy folder.

Thank you so much for this,

I'm trying to back up a Video Project and

It was giving me that error each time,

Creating a different folder allowed me to

copy files to that drive.

dr

I am getting the same error 'The operation can’t be completed because the item "filename" is in use.'

I am copying a number of selected files from the local Mac drive to a Windows mounted file share.

I have tried copying the selected files to a new temp folder on the share - that didn't seem to help...

I am also trying to copy to the folder in the "list" view and I have turned off the view setting 'show icon preview' - this seems to help! Maybe the task to get the preview causes the 'in use' error.

Anyway - turning the icon preview option off and not using the column folder view and creating a new temp folder seem to work.

A bit frustrating though...

The message from mcau apparently resolved the issue for me (os x 10.9.4), wanting to copy to mac formatted external drive:

1/ turn on LIST VIEW for the folder that will receive your files.

2/ for the same folder, ctrl-click, "display presentation option" > disable "show icon preview"

it works for me

I just upgrade to Mavericks from 10.6.8 (via getting new iMac) and was copying my files from a back-up (networked computer) to an external drive (not the onboard iMac drive) and experienced the same thing. I was able to get the files copied (slowly, as I did one main directory at a time (about 20)) by doing a combination of the above, as well as the Terminal command from this blog: http(colon)//danilo(dot)ariadoss(dot)com / how-to-recursively-remove-ds_store-files-on-mac-os-x/

1. I did the disable "show icon preview" from bb-emali above.
2. I used the Terminal command from link above to delete DS_Store files on the back-up.
3. *** When I drag and dropped a folder to the new location, I then immediately closed both windows (the From and To windows). **This made a difference!** I tried without doing this, and I would get the error. When I closed the windows, it copied fine. Very odd, but it worked!!

How I miss 10.6.8. 😟

Thanks so much to everyone who's posted solutions, particularly JohnArtist. The terminal solution didn't work for me, but using Finder did after I'd disabled 'show icon preview' for the destination folder and for good measure closed Finder windows after the copy had started.

Shame about the wasted hours.

This is definitively a nuisance. When copying large amounts of files between volumes try opening a terminal window and use use ditto. You need to type the directory paths of the source and the destination volume. When it starts ditto just coupes and optionally overwrites anything on the destination. You can get a verbose mode where it lists all activities.

gunnars-mac-mini-i7:Volumes gunnar$ man ditto

NAME

ditto -- copy directory hierarchies, create and extract archives

SYNOPSIS

ditto [-v] [-V] [-X] [<options>] src ... dst_directory

ditto [-v] [-V] [<options>] src_file dst_file

ditto -c [-z | -j | -k] [-v] [-V] [-X] [<options>] src dst_archive

ditto -x [-z | -j | -k] [-v] [-V] [<options>] src_archive ... dst_directory

ditto -h | --help

This post by themarcolv helped me. Disable "DiskUnmountWatcher" in Activity Monitor, ftw. Not sure what "DiskUnmountWatcher" does, so try at your own peril.

Tried many of these solutions, but none worked until I QUIT EVERNOTE.

This has been an issue for awhile. Now, no problems copying between disks.

QUIT EVERNOTE and make sure Evernote Helper quits also. There's a checkbox in Preferences you must uncheck to make the Evernote Helper quit when you quit Evernote.

Vulf Dec 21, 2014 9:33 AM
Re: Can't move files - The operation can’t be completed because the item is in use. in response to johnny van rocker

Evernote Helper seems to have been the culprit for me.

I tried disabling DiskUnmountWatcher, with no success. Then I tried disabling Evernote Helper and I was able to copy files to my network drive. So, if you have Evernote, try quitting Evernote and disabling Evernote Helper. You may have to go to Evernote Preferences and uncheck the box that allows Evernote Helper to run in the background even if Evernote is not running.

When I restarted Evernote, I was no longer able to transfer files to my network drive, getting the same message about the file being in use. I have no idea why Evernote causes this conflict, but I'm glad I found a solution. Hope this helps someone.