File sharing broken on Mojave

Same here in my office. About 25 Macs downs for SMB reasons. Mac-Clients can not reliably connect to Mac-Server (all running Mojave 10.14.5!)

Working is almost impossible. SMB Mounts sometimes work for 5 Minutes, then again for 8 hours... Only a server restart (or two, sometimes three) resolves the issue temporarily. The problem started after upgrading the server to Mojave 10.14.5 ... 10.14.4 and below worked fine, as well as 10.13.6 5. 4. 3. etc.

Please Apple show us how to fix it or send an update!!

Also in my office. 6 iMacs downs for SMB reasons. Mac-Clients can not reliably connect to Mac-Server.

SMB Mounts are realy unstable. restart the server resolves the problem temporarily. It started after upgrading the server to 10.14.5. Now I downgradet the server, with TimeMachine, to 10.14.4. Hope it helps!!!

i have to say that i've had this problem much longer then that mojave is out. with a fresh reboot of my macbooks i can easily connect them and transfer files between them but at some point they loose connection and while i can still see the shared folders, it's when i double click on them i get the message 'cant find the specified folder, maybe it's been moved or deleted bla bla bla' and when i try to reconnect in the same session it keeps on failing (well ok actually it just doesnt seem to be doing anything) strange enough the screensharing will stil work. a restart helps for a while but they keep on loosing their connection.

update: per the discussion here and elsewhere, as a workaround I backgraded to 10.14.4 and everything again works perfectly as it did before. I restored from a Time Machine backup. The process is outlined here: https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/downgrade-macos-version/ I used the second method and as a critical information point, note red circle 6 under that method. For those of you going this route, I also advise that following the restore, Time Machine no longer knows that it has backups AFTER the restore date. However, navigating the file system on the backup drive, the later files are there all there but must be manually copied to the right place. So, for example, I copied the entire Users directory from the later date backup drive to replace the restored-from-Time Machine Users directory.

You could consider using the NFS protocol. Apple includes NFS client and server software without a GUI. NFS is a unix based file sharing protocol.

Here is the GUI software.

https://www.bresink.com/osx/NFSManager.html

R

Same problem here. I'm having SMB connections issues from an old Mini running El Capitan to my newer Mini running 10.14.5 (my file server for the house). (Also, my wife's newer Mini running some flavor of 10.14 is having the same issue.) Can sometimes get the connection to come up after reboot of my machine/server, but takes forever to connect, or doesn't connect at all, and doesn't stay up for more than a few minutes. Tried turning off AFP on both machines, but that didn't seem to help.

We have this problem too for all our clients using a mix of 10.13.x and 10.14.x

File sharing is just unreliable now on AFP or SMB or BOTH.

Yes I've tried everything [been doing mac support for 30 years].

It would be more than great, if someone from Apple could tell us, that they are working on it and that the problem will be resolved with the next Update (10.15.6?!). Since I cannot downgrade all my Macs, I will have to work with an old 2011 Macbook as a server which (un)fortunately could get any higher than 10.13.6 and still seems to be working fine with regards to SMB. Reconfiguring the entire Network is quite a task and I would only do it, if I had no other choice. I am sort of desperate; 30 employees will start working tomorrow with only 1 Computer instead of 25...

Further update. I spoke too soon. Finder on client machine hung during copy of a set of 30-40 files to server shared folder. Had to reboot client machine. Now it looks like it is taking a LONG time to access directories on the server. (As soon as I finish this post, I'm going to reboot the server.) I'm having this problem on my home network, so it's not what you'd call a crucial situation, although it's frustrating, since this used to work fine. But my heart goes out to you guys trying to do file sharing for work.

Thank you! I have not been "really" been working in my office for the last 7 days; neither did I sleep much. Only trying to solve this file-sharing nightmare. Bought an old iMac from ebay today, which is running 10.13.6... Will use it as a temporary server until SMB gets debugged...

After recent updates, same problem here, file sharing stops randomly every 2 or 3 hours, during weekdays around 40 people are using the shares. (on MacMini 2018), Older MacMini with High Sierra which we use as a fileserver for video=editing (both with NetStor 24-Bay Thunderbolt2 NA381TB2 storage) works without problems. We probably have to switch to Linux since Apple also dropped ACL settings without further notice in Macos server (we use Tinkertool for this now as a solution). Apple doesn't seems to be able to deliver a reliable system anymore and also being a reliable (business) partner when skipping features without further notice (ACL settings, AFP sharing on APFS shares). Already took my ours of extra work and stress, and losing connection to the server several times a day makes it for our team also hard to be productive. If there is another solution besides a restart please let me know. (restart of filesharing / smb sharing from the terminal doesn't bring the shares up).....

This is really frustrating. I think I overheard something like "great SMB sharing for the iPad" in the recent keynote, and was like yeah, right …

Do we know if Apple follows discussions in this forum? Otherwise I might submit a bug report through the official feedback form. I never got a response when I submitted something there but I guess that at least someone will read it.

https://www.macrumors.com/2019/06/11/apple-joins-cloud-native-computing-foundation/

Looks like Apple are abandoning their loss in Mojave …

q. "macOS Mojave 10.14.6 is likely to be one of the last updates to the macOs Mojave operating system as Apple will soon transition to work on macOS Catalina, announced at WWDC last week."

Probably need the money of all those redundant hardwares abandoned doing the next OS issue ... #grump

Maybe everyone experiencing the problem can share a little bit more about their setup, do you only share APFS volumes or maybe a mix of APFS and HFS+ ("Mac OS Extended")?

In my case the server is an iMac with an internal FusionDrive that got updated to APFS of course. Most of the time there are 3 external hard drives connected that run on HFS+. From the client computers I usually access the internal FusionDrive of the iMac and one of the external HFS+ drives, which I usually both mount on the client computer after startup.

Only very occasionally I access the two other external HFS+ drives, so I only mount them on the client computers when I need to access them.

So, yesterday I found a little note that I made to myself a while back, reminding me to always switch on afp sharing after a macOS update. Because a bunch of times times after I installed an update I had trouble with file sharing not working anymore and after all it turned out that afp automatically got unchecked in the system preferences with the update and only smb was active, so I had to switch it back on and everything was fine.

Now with my internal fusion drive being upgraded to APFS it can’t be shared via afp of course and as mentioned somewhere in this thread before, afp should be turned off to make sure connections will be made through smb.

So when the file sharing problems started for me after installing the 10.14.5 update and I searched the internet about it and saw this mentioned I switched afp off and always made sure it’s off. On every Mojave version prior to 10.14.5 I’m quite sure I always had afp switched on.

Yesterday I did some research again because I was very frustrated with the file sharing connections lasting only a few minutes and freezing/crashing my Finder on both the server and the client. I found an article on a german website mentioning this problem:

https://macandegg.de/2019/06/loesung-macos-10-14-mojave-smb-funktioniert-nicht-finder-stuerzt-ab/

(article in german)

What it essentially says is that their server is running 10.14.5 and that if they only switch on smb for file sharing it results in regular Finder crashes and having to force restart of the Mac.

So they called Apple support and only got the information that the problem persists since 10.13.6.

Now, the solution the article states is to simply use afp instead of smb, no word on APFS volumes that don’t support afp. They do however mention that there are devices that only support smb (i.e. "the documents app on the iPhone") and that the solution is to establish afp connections with other Macs first and then after that switch on smb on the server and it will magically work for other devices.

What I did then was switching on afp on my 10.14.5 server, went to my client and hit ⌘+K in the Finder. In the window that opens I established an afp connection to the server, typing afp:// followed by the server’s IP, hit Enter and it did show a list of all HFS+ drives connected to the server (APFS volume was not showing). I mounted the drive I usually work with and it mounted like a charm.

I then hit ⌘+K again to connect the internal FusionDrive via smb, typing smb:// followed by the server’s IP, chose the internal drive and it also mounted like a charm.

So far the connection seems stable. I tried opening folders and files every once in a while, waited a few minutes and tried again a few times on both volumes. It stayed connected over night and I could access both volumes the next morning. I unmounted and mounted it again using the same method, first the HFS+ volume via afp, then the APFS volume via smb which also worked.

It is of course much too early to tell if this is a solution, I’m still very sceptical, it might just disconnect in a few minutes – but anyway I tought I’d share it now in case there is some information in there that someone can use. And also as I wrote in the beginning it would be interesting to know if others have a similar setup with APFS and HFS+ volumes or if it’s just APFS you’re having problems with.

I am wondering if I had, because it was always switched on in my system before I installed the 10.14.5 update, the HFS+ volumes connected through afp all the time and the update led to changing it to connect via smb and the hassle began?

Thanks for the feedback. Maybe I did this not on purpose but I remember I swicthed from smb to afp adn back finally on smb only because of the APFS shared volume. It seems better so far in comparison of the mess 2 days ago. In addition, I cleared the remembered connections saved in keychain (inclunding all afp smb and different ports to the main server) and maybe this could help too.