Ever since updating to 26.3, I’ve noticed that my mounted SMB shares no longer auto update in Finder. I actually need to get out of the folder and then re-select it (Column View) in order to get Finder to show new files added to that share remotely. Anybody else seeing this?
I have sometimes encountered this with network/external drives under the Sequoia and earlier mac OS. For example using Handbrake to create a new video file on an attached drive and looking for that file with Finder.
You may have encountered a more serious issue with OS26.
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It’s intermittent. I have one Mac here that showed the issue up until yesterday and then all of a sudden started updating properly again for the same SMB share, My main MBP on the other hand, with the same SMB server and mount point, continues to not update. I have to manually go back up and out of the folder, then back down to the folder again, and only then will it update. One of my postdocs has her Studio on 26.2 and she claims she’s suffering from the same issue (same server, different share) so perhaps it’s indeed older than 26.3, but I do not recall having seen it on my MBP before 26.3.
Not sure if this is related but it involves external drives:
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I’m seeing this since the recent 15.7.4 update on one Mac. SMB shares sometimes display fine, many times they take as much as 10 seconds to open a folder and show the contents. Sometimes no contents show at all, but that’s less common.
The same Mac randomly says it’s not connected to the internet, a few seconds later the web page loads. Most times pages load fine. It’s on Ethernet. I can’t find a solution.
I’ve had various problems with my SMB connected NAS since updating to Sequoia from Mojave. I have a number of Applescripts/Automations I’ve written to do things like lock and unlock files or add and remove labels. They’ve worked fine for ages, and they still work on files on the NAS, but the Finder often doesn’t see the changes. And when I dismount the NAS, about half the time the Finder doesn’t notice (even though I did it through the Finder), I have to relaunch the Finder for the icon to be removed from the Desktop (doing a mount in Terminal shows the NAS is actually dismounted).
I can still copy files to and from the NAS, so it serves its primary purpose, but it’s kind of annoying that something that worked perfectly in Mojave was broken in Sequoia, and remains broken through multiple updates to Sequoia, and it sounds like still into Tahoe.
I used to experience that quite a bit with USB-attached SSDs, both older SATA as well as newer NVMe models. At times, connecting the Mac to the drive (or to a TB hub attached to the drive) did just not get the drive to mount in Finder. Instead I had to manually mount the drive with Disk Utility. I could never determine a pattern. It just appeared to randomly happen. I always assumed there must be something bogus in Apple’s USB drivers. Sure enough, with TB3/4attached NVMe SSDs I have yet to see this.
This to me sounds more like a connectivity or network issue.
In the cases we’re observing here, the network itself is fine. Even SMB file read/write traffic is fine. Transfers are blazing fast (10Gbps switches and cabling between our clients and this SMB server). But it’s specifically the refusal to constantly update directory listings client-side when new files get added server-side that has me scratching my head.
Windows or Linux usually offer a manual refresh option to fall back on (like F5), but I’m not aware of any such forced refresh exposed by Finder. I get that it shouldn’t be necessary (because, after all, it just works), but it appears there’s now buggy behavior that appears to make something like that necessary. And because Finder to my knowledge doesn’t directly offer such a manual refresh (like in many areas in land, iOS Calendar comes to mind) without resorting to things like Apple Script, users end up having to close the non-updated SMB directory and drill back down into it just to get its contents to update. Annoying waste of time and loss of productivity. And just to be clear: I’d prefer Apple just fix the actual bug than add a refresh button to Finder.
I have also seen that as of 26.3 (and perhaps already before). The SMB share was unmounted (or connection lost) but the icon remains in Finder. You can choose to eject, but that has no effect. You can even go so far as to mount it again, which then results in two shares being shown in Finder. One functional, the other a zombie leftover. The only way I found to get rid of the zombie is to relaunch Finder. It’s annoying. Considering SMB is what Apple has left us with after they deprecated AFS, they really ought to get it together.
I found this tip:
" Click the back button and return to the directory – When you are working in a folder that has a hierarchy, you can easily just go back to the parent folder and then click back to the folder you were actively working in. This is the fastest way that it can be down. If you would like the keyboard short cut to do this just hit Command+Up Arrow then Command+Down Arrow . Both of these options will have the same result and will refresh the Finder window you are currently utilizing."
(there are many search results for Finder not refreshing)
Yep, exactly what I see, on Sequoia. Worked fine in Mojave (I went from Mojave to Sequoia so don’t know when in there it first stopped working).
I’ve tried that and it hasn’t helped. Maybe the Finder doesn’t re-read the folder when it’s on a network device, or maybe it thinks nothing has changed so doesn’t try to re-read it, but I’ve never seen it refresh anything when working with an SMB mounted device. Sometimes selecting another file then the one it’s not refreshing will refresh it, particularly for labels. But for locked status, if it doesn’t update it correctly the first time (which it does do at times), nothing but unmounting and remounting will make the Finder display the locked status correctly (at least that I’ve found).
This is all on an SMB mounted NAS, I’ve never seen similar problems on direct connected drives.
I also came across this advice several times. Unfortunately, if your directory happens to be at the top level of the SMB share as it is in my case, that won’t work. At least not in Column View. You can easily go up with cmd-up, but then cmd-down won’t know where to go down. And you have to drill down manually. That’s what I’m trying to avoid having to do.
I wonder if this may be a long-standing bug in the SMB protocol itself.
I say this because on Windows, Explorer windows (their equivalent to macOS’s Finder) have a “reload” option. You can type Ctrl-R or click a tool-bar icon to tell the window to automatically reload the contents of the folder.
On my Windows PC, I frequently need to use this - on local drives as well as network drives. An app may create or delete a file in an open window and the window content doesn’t always update until I tell it to reload.
Or I could be completely wrong and we’re just seeing a macOS bug that will (hopefully) be fixed in the next update.