Why doesn't Apple fix the ".DS_Store" bug?

It has nothing to do with

a. Apple bug, it is not,

b. iHope's issue.

Lex,

Regarding a, not an Apple bug:

You're saying that if I have an empty external hard drive, then use Disk Utility to completely erase it, and then try to copy a folder to that drive, when I get the message

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

then that's the expected behavior?

I'm no Apple guru, but to me, that's not a feature, it's a bug.

This used to work for me with no problems, but then started failing a while ago. It may have started with Mavericks, but I don't know, don't care, am not going to mess with it further because I have simple, 10-second workaround that gets around this "feature."

My only continuing interest is whether my workaround is helping others. If it worked for you or did not, either way I'd be interested in hearing about it. There are at least a dozen threads on various forums about this issue, with lots of people way smarter than me not being able to get past it, so I'm curious if my simple fix is a universal solution until Apple allows us to do a copy the natural way, copying to the actual desired destination.

Lex. IT IS A BUG. Get over it! I have a new WD NAS to which I have pushed tons of music. I have a new mini with no external apps (ones that didn't come with the system) except my music player. The music on the NAS is my gold standard. If I change any tags, I do it on the NAS, then copy back to my mini. I frequently get this problem when I try to copy back. BTW, the reason I have two copies, one on the NAS and one on the local machine is backup. I backup from the NAS to my local drive. Why I do it this way isnt' the issue either. The fact that copy is broken IS the issue.

Also, yes this is a ML forum, but I have a clean Mavericks install, and that is it. It has nothing to do with the file structure of Tiger, or Leopard, or.... being different. What this does mean is that this is a persistant bug, lasting through several genertions of OSX.

@Cyberchucker
It is a bug when all or most installations have it. In your case it is you or a few more of the millions. That is called a glitch (unlluckily that is much more difficult to solve). It might even have to do with the Nas in your case (Nas is not one of the strongest points of OSX), I do not know. It comes back to the definitions.

In the iHope case I still think that it is between Tiger and Mavericks, that can be a different glitch (at least that is my opinion now still).

Lex

Hi CyberChucker, iHope and all.

Thanks for all your inputs, I've read it all and in a way I'm happy I'm not the only one experiencing this bug / glitch. Call it how you want, the fact is that a simple copy do not work with some folders.

I have the same error as you guys :

"Impossible d’effectuer l’opération car un élément intitulé « .DS_Store » existe déjà." (in French)

My configuration is : I bought a 4To to put into my 2008 MacPro, so that I have a backup disk with everything on it. The purpose of this disck is to store everything I have on my disc and put it some place else so that if my appartement burns I have a copy safe. I also have a 4To Time Machine drive in the MacPro, but that's for every day backup.

The thing is CyberChucker, your trick does not work for me. I've been on other forums and apple support pages and some guys did present this idea of copying to a dummy folder, but I've tried it many times and it does not work.

Strangely, It's only some folders that are a problem. Some copy well, some just don't, and it's always the same ones.

I'm sorry I don't come with an answer, I just wanted to state that I also have this problem AND that CyberChucker's trick unfortunately does not work for me.

If you guys have any other lead on how to solve this, I'd be happy to read it.

Cheers !

Is the issue solved already?

.DS_Store is a file that appears in every folder, when you delete it it will reappear.

There are however possibilities to avoid creating them on "network" disks:

In your Tinkertool utility choose the Finder tab and check that setting.

You can also delete the .DS_Store files on a volume or in a folder with the help of a utility called Onyx (http://www.titanium.free.fr), they will be rebuild. This may solve the issue.

In Onyx you choose the "Maintenance" page, in there choose the "rebuild" tab, in there is a section called "Appearance of folder's content", in there choose the disks or folders that you want to clean.

Maybe after all .DS_Store files rebuilt you have no or less issues.

Do not use Onyx for anything else ! Uninstall it when you do not need it any more.

Hi Lex,

Unfortunately I have not read anything that solved this issue, neither in this thread nor in others.

Thanks for suggesting again this deletion of all .DS_store files but :

1/ I don't want to do this because it would mean that I loose all my tags (which I use a lot) and other finder window prefs

2/ It's not a viable solution.

By trying to copy files one at a time, I discovered that the ones that posed a problem were the ones with a name starting woth a "#" character. I changed every folders name so there was no "#" left and then the copy went all along with the rest of the files and folders.

I checked if the two drives (the source HD and the backup HD) had the same formating, and yes, they were both formated HFS+ journalised, but not case sensitive.

Could this problem be avoid with a different HD file / bit format ?

cheers

1. you don't loose anything, but the .DS_Store file is renewed, so that any corruption is gone.

2. what is not a "viable solution" ?

Your remark about the special characters may have value: this is seen often in Macs when copying files that were made/named in Windows.

My post was based on the continuous mentioning of "stopping on the .DS_Store" files.

Since I can not simulate your issue, I can not be sure that my proposal will really solve the issue. It may solve the stopping issue and also the special characters issue.

Just wanted to state I have the same issue as others with ML 10.8.5. Quite annoying! I guess I might just try deleting all the .ds_store files and see how that does....

also I will try making a dummy folder and copy to that....

Hi,

I'm usually a reader rather than a "post'er", but this problem has been anoying me for months.

I have been trying to back-up 8TB of various stuff from a QNAP storage to brnad new WD 4TB newly formatted external drives using:

- iMac with Mavericks 10.9.1

- Brand new MacPRo (yes that one...) with Mavericks 10.9.1

- MacBookPRo with Mavericks 10.9.1

and the same .ds_store file problem occurs with all three.

I tried deleting the .DS_store file, changing the sort order, renaming the folder, reformatting the external drive as suggested in various post I read, but nothing worked.

This morning, I tried copying a folder from my NAS to my desktop and then copy that folder from my desktop to the WD drive and "Voila". It worked flawlessly, as it should...

I then took an older MacBookPro running Lion, connected the same external hard disk, reformatted it and tried to copy the same folder from the same NAS to the external drive and guess what: it worked.

So, there you go, there is something buggy in the way Maverick handles the copy process from an external drive to onther external drive.

My guess is that when it creates the new folder on the target drive, it also creates the .ds_store file and then when it comes to copying the original .ds_store to the same folder it cannot.

I also guess that the reson why it does not gives us the choice of overwriting the file is because there should not be any need for that since it is a newly created folder.

That's it for now.

I will be doing more testing and report them here.

Hi Guys,

here are some more news.

I reformatted my iMac hard disk and did a fresh install of Mountain Lion.

I then reformatted my WD HDD and I still can copy directly from my NAS to the external drive without any issue about the .ds_store file.

So, to make a long story short, it is most likely that the copy process in Mavericks is the culprit.

Let's hope that Apple solves this issue in a timely manner...

I had the .DS_Store problem as well running Mac OS 10.7. I was upgrading from a one external hard drive to another larger one. I got the dreaded "The operation can’t be completed because an item with the name “.DS_Store” already exists." message. I read a number of posts about it on the forum after running through a course of reformatting the new drive etc. etc., what I finally did was start copying one drive to the other until I got the dreaded message which occured after only a handful of files had been copied over. I then selected the new larger drive in the finder and used the file "find" to make the invisible DS Store files visible on the new drive. I then dragged all of them to the trash, when I did that they did not disappear from the window but changed to a white colour but they were trashed. I then selected the rest of the folders that needed to be copied over from the smaller harddrive, dragged and dropped them onto the new harddrive and everything transferred without any further problem. I had over 2 TB of photo files so it took sometime but it all worked. I think Cyberchuck's folder solution is better but I did not come it across until after I started my procedure. It appears to me after reading so many posts about this problem on various machines, OS systems, harddrives, flash drives that it is obviously an Apple software glitch