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

ihope not 👿

I believe the problem is in the Partition Map Scheme. I get success in copy files from NAS Qnap to my secondary mac internal HD with GUID Partition Table and error to copy for a Apple Partition Table.

Columns for copying worked!

I'm so glad you were born!

I was having all sorts of file weirdness..

At least when it's a problem, I can use this workaround.

Thanks for that!

it is a bug for sure. Seems it is in both 10.8 and 10.9. Doesn't seem to be related to partition maps that I have seen. I was hoping it was related to the SoftRAID drive I use but since others are seeing the issue then it is OS related. my 10.8 drive was older and had lots of third party software installed. The new Mac Pro 2012 model has a fresh install of 10.7 which was upgraded before copying to 10.8 and then 10.9. So that will make most of the third party software not the issue.

Only good thing I have seen is that it always stops on a completed folder whether the actual folder being copied or a sub folder inside the original folder being copied.

Would be a GREAT IDEA for Apple to fix. Just recently copied just under 11 TB's worth of data off the old Mac Pro to the new 16 TB RAID and it gets REALLY OLD coming back to the computer and have to figure out where it stopped and finish the copying. Tried the deleting of all ".DS_Store" files but still would get the error.

But I will call Apple and report it soon. As I have AppleCare which gives free tech support calls. :-)

Didn't see any dumb errors like this last year copying data off two old 2008 model windows machines moving them to Win 8.1. Sad to see Apple has DUMB errors like this which were not apart of 10.5 , 10.6, or 10.7. ;-)

Oh, this bug has been around since the public beta and still exists today. I just got it under 10.10 on Sunday while copying some files from a friend's thumb drive—and HE got the error whilst copying the files from his MacBook to said thumb drive!

iHope's original post was the first time I'd ever seen anybody give an explanation that made any sense at all for why it occurred. And the solution is obvious: change the copy routines to prevent the OS from creating a new .DS_Store file in the target unless there's not one in the source. It's simple, it's elegant, and best of all, it would end what has been a thorn in my side for the better part of a decade.

Seems to me like the "It just works!" company—the same company that loves to blow its own horn about how much attention it pays to tiny details in design and engineering—would want to take care of this bug. Me, I've seen it in every revision of Mac OS X from the public beta to Yosemite, so I'm ready to call it a feature. 😉

I've run into this problem several times before too over the last few version of OS X. Today, I got the error again (Retina iMac / Yosemite) while trying to copy a little over 500 odd folders containing Mp3's to an external (OS X formatted) HD. It will copy files over for about 10 mins, then get stuck on a folder (containing sub folders) and stop. My only work around is to stop the process - copy over the last folder that it stopped at and then select the remaining files and continue on. This seems to work, although it's a pain and shouldn't be an issue at all. Hope this helps someone at least.

The "dummy folder" workaround by CYBERCHUCKER is for ONE folder with many files, and is not a workaround for folder containing folders.

The copy from "column view" to "column view" fix did not work for me.

I might try the ToolTinker and Onyx fix. Will report back.

My problem: trying to transfer / copy folders containing about 1tb of mostly photos and videos from an old 2009 WD NAS drive to a new Glyph drive. Many files were saved back when I was a Windows user. I suspect that might be the issue, or the NAS thing could be the problem, as stated by others. Way too painful to correct every stop error. I'm wondering if I should just borrow or buy a Windows laptop to see if it works without issue. What a major inconvenience this has been and for so long without an official fix by Apple. Shame on Apple.

Apple users (me included) have been struggling with this problem for at least 8 years through all of the OS-X versions! See: ... because an item with the name ".DS_Store" already exists from 8/21/06. The only explanation I can imagine for such an astoundingly poor response to such a dramatic failure of such a basic function for such a simple and known reason is simply that all of Apple's competition is even worse and they figure there's no point in wasting the money. Back in the day (Apple user for 36 years, Mac since 1983 -- pre-release), Apple would have been embarrassed to sent an OS or any other software out the door with such problems. Today, not so much. (But, the interface is pretty, even if not so useful.)

Do you have any idea how wealthy this company is? http://www.forbes.com/companies/apple/

This is a long-standing, well-documented problem affecting many users and compromising one of the most basic functions of their primary product. They could sift through the couch cushions and scare up half a billion to throw at the problem and never miss it.

Unacceptable. As is the reliance on super-fans to help give customer support on these boards.

All that said - I'm encountering this problem in Mavericks, but it seems that if I just click "Okay" on the dialogue window, the copy resumes. Not ideal, but I can live with it.

How much money Apple has in the bank has absolutely nothing to do with locating a bug. Have you even done any programming? It doesn't sound like it.

Like this one - Adobe's CS5 and CS6 software also has a bug that affects very few users overall. You can install the OS clean, then the Adobe software, and you will get server errors saving your images. Worse, when the dialogue appears saying something like "xxxx.tif could not be saved.", it also deletes the file from the server! You have to remember to immediately do a Save As to get a file back on a drive somewhere before you close the image from Photoshop's interface, or it's gone. The fix for those with this problem is to reinstall the OS right after installing the CS5 or CS6 software, even though you just installed the OS.

I worked with Chis Cox on this for over a week. We even used a small Terminal tool that makes an index of every file on your drive. You then do your next install of software and run it again. It then gives you a comparison of every single file that was changed, added or removed. There was nothing that gave the slightest indication why installing CS5 or CS6 was causing this issue, or why reinstalling the OS after the Adobe software fixed it. It made no sense. And Chris is no slouch. He's been with Adobe for a very long time and is a senior developer. And he still couldn't figure out why.

So understand that tons of money, and very experienced programmers does not automatically equal being able to find an obscure bug.

Edit: That said, I, and many users feel Apple (especially the past few years) is putting far too much energy into packing every bell and whistle into the Mac OS and iOS they can think of. And in much too close of a release schedule. Do users really need yet another major release just a year after the last one? I'd like to see at least two years between such releases and more emphasis making what's current more stable.

I understand it's all complex. However, reports of this problem date back years. Hard to believe Apple couldn't solve or at least come up with a workaround to post within that time frame. Only true explanation is that they haven't prioritized it.

And now am as frustrated as everyone else - My copy ultimate failed b/c of this problem. I was clicking "okay, okay" everytime it popped up. And last one aborted the copy. Uhg.

Unfortunately, Apple has been relegating fixes to the next OS rather than the one it's been reported in. I found, and fully verified a very ugly color bug in Mountain Lion. It took some time to convince Apple I wasn't "doing something wrong" to cause it myself. Very few users overall had this problem with ML. Even users with the exact same hardware I have couldn't replicate it. It was very machine specific and difficult to track down. Apple's engineers even called me to discuss it.

But per my initial sentence, Apple did find and fix it, but users who had the issue had to upgrade to Mavericks to get the fix. Mountain Lion was left just the way it is, and still is.

I've myself just recently run my head into the wall that is this bug. It concerns copying folders from a NAS til any locally connected HFS+ volume.

The bug comes in two forms: First a variation where a file copy from the NAS results in the Finder complaining that the file cannot be copied because it is being written to a file system that does not differentiale between upper and lowercase letters. The second is the standard ".DS_Store already exists". Only some folders being copied triggers the bug.

As if this isn't silly enough in itself, the bug also makes the Finder throw its hands up in the air, and halts the copy process. I'm baffled as to why it doesn't carry on after throing the error.

There has been a change of how the mds_stores and mdworker handles DS-store files (etc). Attaching old harddrives that was last used inder 10.5 or 10.6 takes up to several hours for Spotlight to re-index such a drive, and from the mod dates its sown that some (?) of the DS_store files are recently modified.

Now, some workarounds:

1) Use muCommander (a Java file manager that is an alternative to the Finder). It works, but it fails to copy all the invisible "._$filename" files that are attacked to all Mac files stored on foreign file systems, which makes it a mess trying to do a file compare using diff (Terminal command).

2) Boot the Mac from an older OS X and copy the files back. Both 10.5.x and 10.6.x have worked thus without a flaw for me.

Which brings me to the other aspects of this...

First that a bug that is such a pain like this gets *introduced* into the Finder, after having been a non-issue for several releases, which is plain exasperating.

Second, that it's not fixed in the release it is present in, but requiring the user to do a full upgrade to the next release. Sure, the releases are free at the moment, but each release tends to contain its own collection of bugs that doesn't get ironed out after a couple of sub-releases which is at best a bother, at worse a show-stopper in some production environmentes.

Third, it is true that Apple's bank balance is not in itself indicative of the company's fixing of bugs or not, however it is reasonable to expect that a good cash situation would mean more resources given to QA and bug fixing.

As many have mentioned, this bug is hardly new - some claim to have experienced it since 10.1. So it's not the bug reports/awareness of it that have kept Apple from fixing it, is it?

regards, P

No.

Pete

thanx DaChavez!

It worked for me copying 500Gb of folders/subfolders from one external disk to another via a MacBookPro running 10.9.