Finder refresh issues and Time Machine drive icon

gfs2008 wrote:

It's easy to take away the permission change that we tried.

It is easy to do for the TM volume itself, but for those that also used the "Apply to Enclosed Items..." option, there is no easy way to revert all those items to their correct permissions settings. Typically, there will be at least tens of thousands of enclosed items, & their proper permissions settings vary greatly, making almost impossible to undo all those changes.

This can cause significant problems if you use TM to restore files or folders since many of the restored items could & probably will have incorrect permissions. (Apple does provide the command line "resetpassword" tool accessible from the Recovery System, which can be used to reset Home folder permissions & ACL's, but AFAIK this only restores the proper settings for top level Home folders, not for their subfolders or the files they contain.)

This applies to anything you use the "Apply to Enclosed Items..." option on. It should never be applied to any high level folder & only to deeply nested ones if you are absolutely sure you know everything it contains should have the same permissions as the containing folder (which is very rarely the case).

I'm using two iMacs. The permissions on the Time Machine Volumes for each machine are very different, irrespective of the changes I [thought] might be a fix. But I understand your point about permissions.

I'm beta testing 10.11.2 on yet another machine. It has the same Time Machine icon problem. In fact, all my Macs and MacBooks (4) have similar Time Machine icon issues, all running El Capitan. Time Machine also seems to run into problems when the disk is full and it has to delete existing versions.)

(On that machine, it had me read-write already but didn't have the administrator as a user. Adding it changed the icon to blue, but it didn't last beyond one reboot. I thought I found an easy fix. Guess not.)

Using the Feedback Assistant for Apple's Beta program, I've sent in a detailed bug report of the problem. Feedback Assistant retrieves specific files and logs and sends them in to Apple with the report and indicating that's its a time machine issue.

I wrote:

What works for me to change the Time Machine's desktop icon from the yellow generic one back to the blue TM one is this two part process ...

UPDATE: after quite a bit more experimentation, I discovered what works for me is my step two from the earlier post -- no need to run First Aid first -- BUT it only works after at least one TM backup has occurred since restarting the Mac or logging into your user account.

So my revised workaround is this:

1. Wait until a TM backup has completed.

2. Open Finder's preferences to the General tab

3. Toggle off & then back on the preference to show external disks on the desktop.

The desktop TM drive icon should immediately change to the blue TM one when you toggle back on the preference. This should persist until you log out or shut down the Mac.

This has consistently worked for me for several days & many restarts. I would like to know if it works for you as well.

That did work for me too. Thank you. Hopefully it won't revert back after several restarts.

gfs2008 wrote:

That did work for me too. Thank you. Hopefully it won't revert back after several restarts.

For me, it reverts to the yellow icon after every restart. But as long as I wait for at least one TM backup to occur first, it only takes a few seconds to open Finder prefs, do the toggle, & close the pref window. So basically, my OCD issues with the yellow icon only occur briefly, once per restart. 😝

amstel78 wrote:

@R C-R,

Your workaround is just that - a workaround. What you're doing is essentially forcing the Finder to refresh the desktop drive icons. It's the same as if you killed the Finder in terminal and restarted it.

Not exactly. I tried killing & relaunching Finder & for me that doesn't change the icon, even after several TM backups have occurred.

What should happen with a properly working Finder is after a reboot, the drive's icon will remain yellow until TM has completed its first backup after system restart.

That isn't quite the way it has worked on my Macs running any OS X version I have used prior to El Capitan. For me, doing anything that 'touches' the TM drive, like a Get Info or opening it, would set the icon to the blue TM one, even if no backup had occurred since it last started up.

amstel78 wrote:

How did you kill the finder? There's two ways of doing it. One is through terminal by typing killall -KILL Finder. The other is by quitting Finder through the GUI after entering the following in Terminal: defaults write com.apple.finder QuitMenuItem -bool YES.

Doing either of the above kills and restarts Finder thus forcing it to refresh and applying the correct desktop drive icons.

I know about & have used both methods. Neither has resulted in the TM drive icon being restored on my Macs running 10.11.1. Neither has logging out & back in, which kills Finder along with everything else running in my user account domain.

Simply using Force Quit/relaunch finder always changes the icon for me. I found this the easiest way to placate my OCD 😕

boblishman wrote:

Simply using Force Quit/relaunch finder always changes the icon for me. I found this the easiest way to placate my OCD 😕

Does that work for you even if no TM backup has occurred since you last started up your Mac or logged into your user account?

I try to avoid force quitting Finder when possible because like when force quitting any other application it doesn't do any 'housekeeping' a normal quit would perform. That includes not just saving open files (which obviously does not apply to Finder unless a copy or move operation is in progress) but also updating caches, preferences (including for Finder windows last state variables), & so on.

Everything should be set right on relaunch but sometimes that doesn't seem to occur, occasionally leading to some odd behavior.

Just something to think about.

R C-R wrote:

Does that work for you even if no TM backup has occurred since you last started up your Mac or logged into your user account?

No. There needs to be at least one new backup since logging on for this to work, but I always thought that was the correct behaviour for the icon (i.e the icon changes from orange "generic" hd to green TimeMachine after the first new backup since logging on). I didn't have an external hd backup with Mavericks ... only since Yosomite.

boblishman wrote:

... but I always thought that was the correct behaviour for the icon (i.e the icon changes from orange "generic" hd to green TimeMachine after the first new backup since logging on).

FWIW, I have been using Time Machine for backups since it was first introduced in OS X 10.5 Leopard. To the best of my memory (which these days admittedly is not as reliable as it was in those days) the TM volume always showed the distinctive TM icon on the desktop immediately after logging in to any user account set to show it there. At some point that changed, but I am fairly sure it was in a recent version of OS X.