Finder Shows All My Files 3 Times

This has only been happening for the past week or so but it has now started to really annoy me. Every time I open Finder to search through my files or just open something everything under "All Files" is displayed 3 times. Originally I tried deleting one file (of the 3 being displayed) however that resulted in deleting all three of them at the same. Hence the same document is displayed 3 times however no matter which one i try to delete, I delete only one file - the original. This problem seems to be sometimes resolved by relaunching Finder however this is not always the case.

I have also found that the "All Files" tab displays documents that I cannot somehow delete. For example, if have a word document called "Work", this document is displayed twice where the second document is then titled "~$rk". The second file however cannot be deleted! When this second document is selected, the bar at the bottom which normally lets me know where the document is saved, only displays the title of the document as if it not saved anywhere. Additionally, when searching "~$" using the search bar in Finder, no documents are found.

Please let me know if I am doing something wrong or what I can do to fix this!

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MacBook Pro (Retina, 13-inch, Mid 2014), iOS 9.0.2, null

Posted on Oct 30, 2016 8:22 PM

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12 replies

Jun 28, 2017 1:30 PM in response to mariasounios

I had the exact same problem, but with a much easier solution, if you type command, option and escape at the same time it brings up the force quit menu (you can also click the apple logo at the top right of the screen and choose the option, "Force Quit..."). There you can click on finder and hit restart. After that the problem should be solved, if not I would get an app called omnidisk sweeper (which was recommended to me by apple employees) and you can see if there is actually more than one version of each file. If there is I would first back up everything important and then call apple.

Oct 31, 2016 8:19 AM in response to mariasounios

Might be a corrupt .plist.


Do a backup, preferably 2 backups on 2 separate drives.


Quit the application.


In Finder hold down the option/alt key while selecting the Go menu item. Select Library. Then go to Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist. Move the .plist to your desktop.


Restart the computer, open the application and test. If it works okay, delete the plist from the desktop.


If the application is the same, return the .plist to where you got it from, overwriting the newer ones.


If you want to make your user library permanently visible, run the below command in Applications/Utilities/Terminal.


chflags nohidden ~/Library/


You will need to do that after any updates.

Oct 31, 2016 9:22 PM in response to Eric Root

Hello Eric,

Thank you for your reply however I must ask you a couple questions as I am not sure what to do here.


You mentioned doing 2 back ups. Is this a back up of the folders of the whole MacBook? I already have a back up created by Time Machine on my hard drive so would that do the trick?


Also when you said "quit the application" are you referring to Word? As seen by the screenshot the duplicates that Finder displays are all sorts of different files including documents, images and music.

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Finder Shows All My Files 3 Times

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