"Old" aliases do not work in 10.8

[bretperry]

Aliases created in any OS before 10.8 Mountain Lion do not work in 10.8

So old aliases won't work and neither would a new one created by a Lion 10.7 user or older OS.

Apple Support - Engineer escalation has confirmed "that is expected behavior" because they have changed they way aliases are handled by the OS.

They have no plans to fix it.
There is no easy workaround other than creating a new alias in 10.8 (or "fixing" the alias in 10.8)

10.8 aliases do work in Lion.

Of course, to re-create or fix the alias you would need to find the original, which may not be easy. (I have hundreds of aliases on my server)

 

[LCD]

Aliases created in any OS before 10.8 Mountain Lion do not work in 10.8

So old aliases won't work and neither would a new one created by a Lion 10.7 user or older OS.

Apple Support - Engineer escalation has confirmed "that is expected behavior" because they have changed they way aliases are handled by the OS.

They have no plans to fix it.
There is no easy workaround other than creating a new alias in 10.8 (or "fixing" the alias in 10.8)

10.8 aliases do work in Lion.

Of course, to re-create or fix the alias you would need to find the original, which may not be easy. (I have hundreds of aliases on my server)

Thanks for this post. I see that Apple Discussions have many dealing with different kinds of alias problems in 10.8. Like if you delete the word alias from the end of the file name it won't work. But the alias will work if you command-option drag it from the original in the Finder when creating it.

I'm in the process of fixing thousands of aliases created in Snow Leopard and earlier. One undocumented problem I have is the effect on aliases made or fixed in 10.8 after editing both the name and content of the original file. The name of the alias will change to a row of long numbers and point to the original file BEFORE the change to the file was made.

These broken aliases reside in a hidden folder that I've only been able to get on my desktop once by pressing command-return while that alias was highlighted in Spotlight. These aliases don't respond to any changes I try to make by 'selecting new original' in the Inspector panel and must be trashed.

A few times I have been able to change the name of an original after editing it without contaminating its alias, but I can't figure out why.

 

[bretperry]

LCD - Where are originals?

LCD - Curious, where are your originals, on a server or external drive or internal? AFP or SMB if server?
Happily I have not had your issue but I have seen other posts complaining of it.

My issue (broken aliases in 10.8, no name change involved) -- various aliases on SMB server work fine on one client OS (say 10.6) but not on another (like 10.8). Some issues user-login specific, some OS specific. We have been moving from AFP to new servers, so hoping it is mostly a configuration issue we can solve now that our final migration is done. We'll see. Also affects labels (and icons).

But on local non-network drives, it can only be the bug:

On external disks, and flash drives moved between computers, all aliases from any OS work in 10.6, and 10.7, but 10.7-created aliases do not work in 10.8, even when they are fine in 10.6 and 10.7.

 

[LCD]

LCD - Curious, where are your originals, on a server or external drive or internal? AFP or SMB if server?
Happily I have not had your issue but I have seen other posts complaining of it.

Internal. The iMacs had Fusion Drives. I have less 115GB of data so I never had to access their 2.5" 5400-rpm hard drives. The Mini has 256GB of flash storage.

I switched to a Mini because of my experience with the screen in my last computer, a 17" 2006 iMac with a serial number starting with W86, and then the two 2012 iMac displays I received in December - the first possibly related to the glueing process, the second a dead pixel.