Finder favorites keep disappearing

[MacFan782040]

My sidebar favorites in Finder keep randomly disappearing in Big Sur 11.0.1. A restart doesn't bring them back, I have to manually drag back in my items, like movies, downloads, and a few custom folders.

Any ideas?

 

[buckrock]

Describe what you did in the 4 minutes between the two screenshots. Thanks

 

[MacFan782040]

Describe what you did in the 4 minutes between the two screenshots. Thanks

Added the folders back in manually.

 

[chabig]

My sidebar favorites in Finder keep randomly disappearing in Big Sur 11.0.1

You should update to 11.1.

 

[omicronx9]

You should update to 11.1.

that doesn't solve this issue

 

[buckrock]

Added the folders back in manually.

Ok. Do the folders randomly disappear while the Finder window remains open. Or do they disappear in the time between closing and reopening the Finder window? If they simply don’ t stick when reopened, I think your problem may be related to the resizing of open/save windows that lots of folks are seeing, including me. Check this discussion. The good news is that it is fixed in the release candidate 2 of 11.2.

 

[MacFan782040]

Ok. Do the folders randomly disappear while the Finder window remains open. Or do they disappear in the time between closing and reopening the Finder window? If they simply don’ t stick when reopened, I think your problem may be related to the resizing of open/save windows that lots of folks are seeing, including me. Check this discussion. The good news is that it is fixed in the release candidate 2 of 11.2.

Interesting, thanks. No, it happens when a window is closed. They just don't go poof as I watch, or something like that. What is weird is I've had Big Sur for months now and this just started happening this week. I'll await the update.

 

[MacFan782040]

that doesn't solve this issue

Happening to you also?

 

[buckrock]

If you have your USB installer, just reinstall MacOS on top of your existing drive. It is perfectly safe but will refresh a lot of system stuff. Personally, I’d install 11.1 or wait a few more days for the 11.2 release. Try to make and use a USB installer if you can.

 

[MacFan782040]

Just noticed it cleared all of my cities in my weather widgets, also

 

[myfranco]

Same thing happened an hour ago. Desktop disappeared and I added manually. Did nothing to kill Desktop in my favorite tab.

 

[itsapple]

You should update to 11.1.

I have 11.6 installed and still getting the same issue.

Any idea guys?

 

[DJ Rob]

Had the same issue with Finder sidebar favorites resetting to the default selection a few times, but it seems to have sorted itself out. I'm on 11.6, however the issue has not reoccured for at least a couple of months.

 

[ecatomb]

Sometimes, I had this issue too...

 

[DrKarl]

Favorites disappeared for me yesterday - about 2/3 of the folders that I had dragged into the Favorites sidebar were just gone. Apparently there used to be a plist file for this list. In Big Sur (11.6.6 at the moment), I finally found the list in

~/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl2

With that item highlighted, I entered Time Machine and clicked the up/back in time button and the last backed up version was a month ago (which is weird, since I had manually removed a few item since then), and was bigger in size than the current file. Restoring it (replace option) restored everything in the sidebar. I have no idea what might have corrupted it, but good to not have to recreate the list of items.

 

[usagora]

This happens to me on my iMac, but not my Mac Mini, even though they are always running the latest non-beta version of macOS. And not all of my favorites disappear, but many do. VERY frustrating. Many of them are OneDrive folders, but that can't be the issue because they're the same folders I dragged to the Favorites sidebar on my Mac Mini and those don't disappear.

So as a workaround, what I'm doing is creating a "favorites" folder in my home directory and putting aliases in there for all the folders I normally had over in my sidebar. Then I drag the "favorites" folder to the Finder sidebar. So now if macOS decides to randomly remove THAT folder from the sidebar, all I have to do is drag ONE folder back, not many.

 

[tkjune]

This happens to me on my iMac, but not my Mac Mini, even though they are always running the latest non-beta version of macOS. And not all of my favorites disappear, but many do. VERY frustrating. Many of them are OneDrive folders, but that can't be the issue because they're the same folders I dragged to the Favorites sidebar on my Mac Mini and those don't disappear.

So as a workaround, what I'm doing is creating a "favorites" folder in my home directory and putting aliases in there for all the folders I normally had over in my sidebar. Then I drag the "favorites" folder to the Finder sidebar. So now if macOS decides to randomly remove THAT folder from the sidebar, all I have to do is drag ONE folder back, not many.

Generally same to me. Happens to my MBP 14 2021, but not in my iMac 2015, same macOS 12.6.2. VERY frustrating too.

 

[n00byn4t3r]

Unfortunately this is still happening on my MBA 2020 i7 with macOS Sonoma. Can't seem to find any fixes online either.