When copying folders, especially large ones, containing subfolders, from my WD NAS to my mini, the copy process aborts and I have to painfully copy the lowest level folders one by one. It almost appears that OSX doesn't recognize the hidden file as being hidden. Is this an OSX bug???
Mac mini, OS X Mavericks (10.9.1)
Usually it means that the AFP implementation on the NAS is incompatible with Mavericks. You might have better luck with another protocol, such as SMB or NFS, if the device supports it.
Linc - Thanks for the response. However, if my local machine is smart enough to recognize that it is trying to copy .DS_Store on top of a preexisting .DS_Store, good behavior would be to skip that one file and continue copying. At the end of the copy process, the OS could report that files x,y, and z failed to copy.
Bad behavior is for the operating system to simply abort midway through the copy process. If I'm copying 15-20,000 files in hundreds of folders, each with sub folders, (which I do often) it is a real PITA to figure out what has copied and what hasn't. It is ESPECIALLY bad behavior when the copy process aborts, and then when I try to simply trash the partial file, the partial file can not be removed from the trash because "a file is in use", and I have to resort to a terminal based nuke ( rm -rf ~/.Trash/* ).
So, although there may be issues with WD file transfer protocol (my NAS), I see no reason my mac can't deal with the problem more gracefully than to simply abort, leaving me a mess to clean up. As a long time software developer, I consider that to be a bug in the OS as well as one in WD's firmware.
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!
You might find the setting "Disable the creation of hidden Finder .DS_Store files on network volumes" which can be easily set in TinkerTool useful.
http://www.bresink.com/osx/0TinkerTool/details.html
I cannot test it myself, just a suggestion.
Solved my problem without having to do terminal level input - thank you!
If you would post how you solved it, it might help others.
Sorry - thought I typed a direct reply to the post that solved my problem: I used column view as described by ZoiVan (Jun 6, 2014) and was able to copy nested folders and large numbers of files without getting the ".DS_Store already exists" Error.
What is the fix for copying stopping because ".DS_Store already exists"
