File/Folder Replacement Bug? macOS Sonoma

TidBITS Talk
1

Hello,
So… I was replacing a folder of files onto a back up drive that has, essentially, the same folder,
and was opting to simply drag/drop replace the folder rather than piecemeal add new or edited files to the back up folder .
Received the message, not verbatim: cannot replace folder because it is in use by another application.um, which it really wasn’t … but never mind that
So I clicked one of the offered options “STOP”

The result of this little interaction was for the system to actually delete, i.e. empty the receiving folder. This does make sense. While I cannot bring up that dialog, the only obvious option that I paid attention to was to STOP the process … … in any event, the system should not have deleted anything it should have either replaced items or Stopped (um, like it was asked to)
Thoughts please.

1 Like
2

Do you want, um, thoughts on what to do next or on if Sonoma is flawed or on something else? Then we all can go from there…

1 Like
3

Well
Just thoughts on other’s experience I guess
The incident was clearly a glitch I’ve never really encountered

It sort of reminded me of a Mac OS glitch from about 30 years ago wherein deleting an alias would result in deleting the original file

My personal solution is now not to replace files but to copy over new versions then manually delete old ones

4

I’d say in my experience with Apple OS’s, uninformative error messages and opaque consequences from choosing an option have become more and more common over time.

As well, on the last few versions of macOS through Ventura (I’m not going to go to Sonoma until I get a new machine sometime in the next few months), ejecting disks and deleting files getting interrupted by “in use” error messages is not that unusual. I’ve always just assumed it was due to Apple shifting development resources from Intel to Apple Silicon. In any case, it doesn’t happen often enough to make me do troubleshooting.

3 Likes