Finder Favorites Sidebar issue

[netnothing]

I'm running Lion on my 2010 Mac Pro. I have the following drives installed/attached:

MacHD - SSD boot drive in 2nd optibay
Personal - internal
Work - internal
StorageHD1 - internal
StorageHD2 - internal
MacBackup - external TM
MacExternal - external

Now, the "Favorites" section of the Finder sidebar is driving me crazy. For some reason.....the Personal drive ALWAYS shows up in the Favorites section. I can remove it.....but relaunching Finder or rebooting will have it come right back.

I even went as far as to delete:
com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
com.apple.finder.plist

Reboot, reset everything....and it still comes back.

Does anyone else see an issue like this? Anyone know of any other .plist file I can trash to get this to not happen.

Driving me nuts

-Kevin

 

[reu214]

May help

Check the the Preferences/Sidebar to see if you can uncheck it.

I have a similar problem with a file, that I don't think I added to the sidebar, and now can't remove. Same thing, reboot, relaunch, no help.

 

[reu214]

Found it!

A guy posted this on another forum, and it worked for me.

"Hold command AND option, then drag it off the Favorites bar. The item will turn into a little "poof" white cloud and when you release, it'll go away! Finally!"

 

[netnothing]

A guy posted this on another forum, and it worked for me.

"Hold command AND option, then drag it off the Favorites bar. The item will turn into a little "poof" white cloud and when you release, it'll go away! Finally!"

That's my problem....I CAN remove it from the sidebar fine. If I relaunch Finder (either manually or a reboot) it will return.

Even though it's a drive (Device), for some reason it's showing as if I dragged it into favorites.

I have a sneaky feeling its something to do with the upgrade, although I figured removing those .plist files would fix it. Maybe there's another file somewhere controlling it.

-Kevin

 

[peterbanks]

I've got the same problem. Have you by chance figured out how to keep it from coming back?

 

[netnothing]

I've got the same problem. Have you by chance figured out how to keep it from coming back?

I've narrowed my issue down to the fact I was dragging my Dropbox folder to the sidebar favorites. For some reason, because my Dropbox folder is not on my boot drive, it's on the "Personal" drive, something in Dropbox is causing the "Personal" drive to also be added when Dropbox starts.

I have a ticket open with Dropbox to see if they can figure anything out.

Basically, I can drag ANY other folder from the Personal drive to the sidebar and Personal itself is never added. I can even drag the Dropbox folder there fine....as long as Dropbox doesn't start.

There's something about the Dropbox service when it start upon boot that causes Finder to add my Personal drive to the side.

Do you have your Dropbox folder in the sidebar? Curious to see if that's your issue as well.

-Kevin

 

[baryon]

I have Dropbox in my Favorites, and no drives show up in the Favorites bar, only in the Devices bar. Then again, I have everything on the same internal drive, so my setup isn't the same.

 

[netnothing]

I have Dropbox in my Favorites, and no drives show up in the Favorites bar, only in the Devices bar. Then again, I have everything on the same internal drive, so my setup isn't the same.

Yeah, that's what I'm guessing is the issue.

On my Macbook (which only has the 1 drive), I have Dropbox in Favorites just fine.

Like I said....I can add ANY other folder from either the Personal drive or any of the other 3 internal drives and it works fine. It's only the Dropbox folder, not being on the boot drive AND when the Dropbox service starts.

For now I've removed Dropbox from the sidebar and I'm using the menubar and Finder menubar icons.

-Kevin

 

[peterbanks]

I've narrowed my issue down to the fact I was dragging my Dropbox folder to the sidebar favorites. For some reason, because my Dropbox folder is not on my boot drive, it's on the "Personal" drive, something in Dropbox is causing the "Personal" drive to also be added when Dropbox starts.

I have a ticket open with Dropbox to see if they can figure anything out.

Basically, I can drag ANY other folder from the Personal drive to the sidebar and Personal itself is never added. I can even drag the Dropbox folder there fine....as long as Dropbox doesn't start.

There's something about the Dropbox service when it start upon boot that causes Finder to add my Personal drive to the side.

Do you have your Dropbox folder in the sidebar? Curious to see if that's your issue as well.

-Kevin

Mine has to do with one of my internal drives. I have an SSD as my boot drive and then a separate drive for my home folder, it's named "Home". The two remaining internal drives are named "Media" and "Video". All the drives show up under the Devices list in Finder, but it's the "Home" drive that keeps getting added under the Favorites list. I remove it, but it just keeps coming back. I've had this setup for a while and never had any issues with previous versions of OSX. It's obviously not a major issue, just annoying.

 

[petvas]

I'm running Lion on my 2010 Mac Pro. I have the following drives installed/attached:

MacHD - SSD boot drive in 2nd optibay
Personal - internal
Work - internal
StorageHD1 - internal
StorageHD2 - internal
MacBackup - external TM
MacExternal - external

Now, the "Favorites" section of the Finder sidebar is driving me crazy. For some reason.....the Personal drive ALWAYS shows up in the Favorites section. I can remove it.....but relaunching Finder or rebooting will have it come right back.

I even went as far as to delete:
com.apple.sidebarlists.plist
com.apple.finder.plist

Reboot, reset everything....and it still comes back.

Does anyone else see an issue like this? Anyone know of any other .plist file I can trash to get this to not happen.

Driving me nuts

-Kevin

Don't worry, you are not alone! I have posted this as a bug almost one month ago and Apple knows about it.

 

[netnothing]

Mine has to do with one of my internal drives. I have an SSD as my boot drive and then a separate drive for my home folder, it's named "Home". The two remaining internal drives are named "Media" and "Video". All the drives show up under the Devices list in Finder, but it's the "Home" drive that keeps getting added under the Favorites list. I remove it, but it just keeps coming back. I've had this setup for a while and never had any issues with previous versions of OSX. It's obviously not a major issue, just annoying.

Interesting.....so do you have any Favorites added to the sidebar that are folder 'within' Home?

Don't worry, you are not alone! I have posted this as a bug almost one month ago and Apple knows about it.

Cool....thanks for the update. I have a bug report in as well.....guessing it'll get marked as a dup at some point.

-Kevin

 

[peterbanks]

Interesting.....so do you have any Favorites added to the sidebar that are folder 'within' Home?
-Kevin

Yes, my "Home" folder which is designated with my Short Name, and hello... my Dropbox folder. I don't know why I just noticed that. I'm gonna remove the Dropbox folder from Favorites and see what happens. I do have folders from my other internal drives listed in favorites but their host drives are not being added. So it looks like it may be a Dropbox issue.

 

[netnothing]

Yes, my "Home" folder which is designated with my Short Name, and hello... my Dropbox folder. I don't know why I just noticed that. I'm gonna remove the Dropbox folder from Favorites and see what happens. I do have folders from my other internal drives listed in favorites but their host drives are not being added. So it looks like it may be a Dropbox issue.

Will be interesting to hear. Like I said....I can add ANY folder from my Personal drive without issue.....even the Dropbox folder if I don't start Dropbox. It's just the Dropbox folder and Dropbox service starting up.

I'll update this post if I hear more from Dropbox on my ticket.

-Kevin

 

[Nikonian]

Same issue here. I have a optibay drive installed, and I used to have dropbox installed on 10.6. When I did the Lion upgrade my storage drive, the optibay drive, is in the favorites sidebar in the finder and comes back upon being removed. I find it interesting that it may have something to do with dropbox and if that's the case Apple may not address the problem at all.

 

[haravikk]

Any progress on this issue? I have the exact same problem, however, while I have DropBox installed, I removed the DropBox folder from my Finder sidebar (since I relocated mine to Documents, which is in my sidebar already).

I have my OS on an SSD called "Mac OS", and most of my user folders symbolically linked onto a hard drive called "Files" (except for the ~/Library folders which are on the SSD as well). Every time I restart the Finder, the "Files" drive appears under Favourites in my Sidebar.

Very annoying bug! So I do have DropBox like everyone else, but I don't actually have my DropBox folder in the Finder sidebar. I first noticed the issue when I renamed the drive in the sidebar, as after renaming it I had the newly renamed drive under both Devices and Favourites.

 

[yashrg]

I have the same problem too!
I think now there are about 7 of us?
Haravikk
Nikonian
Kbmb
Petvas
Peterbanks

I didn't even realize it was because of Dropbox until kbmb pointed it out. I don't even have dropbox in my startup/login items and still the external hard drive shows up in the Favorites. I would love to know what Dropbox or Apple are doing about this!

 

[judgejohn82]

I have the same problem too!
I think now there are about 7 of us?
Haravikk
Nikonian
Kbmb
Petvas
Peterbanks

I didn't even realize it was because of Dropbox until kbmb pointed it out. I don't even have dropbox in my startup/login items and still the external hard drive shows up in the Favorites. I would love to know what Dropbox or Apple are doing about this!

Just stumbled across this thread from a Google forum. I'm having exactly the same issue.

Similar setup (SSD boot/apps drive, HD for all media with symlinks). I have Dropbox installed and have tried removing it from the sidebar but this doesn't work. No matter what I do, the HD icon appears in the sidebar. Very annoying.

 

[MBP Newbie]

Remove Finder Sidebar Item - THIS WORKS

A guy posted this on another forum, and it worked for me.

"Hold command AND option, then drag it off the Favorites bar. The item will turn into a little "poof" white cloud and when you release, it'll go away! Finally!"

Thank you! That worked for me. Seems I tried every other key combination except that one. Mac Help was no help at all.

 

[haravikk]

Thank you! That worked for me. Seems I tried every other key combination except that one. Mac Help was no help at all.

All that does is remove the icon normally; if you mount any device such as an external drive or disk-image, then the icon just comes right back… at least it does for me.

 

[GGJstudios]

All that does is remove the icon normally; if you mount any device such as an external drive or disk-image, then the icon just comes right back… at least it does for me.

If you don't want to see drives in the sidebar, go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and uncheck whatever you don't want to see.

Thank you! That worked for me. Seems I tried every other key combination except that one. Mac Help was no help at all.

You don't need to hold the Option key, only the Command key:
How to remove an item from the Finder sidebar in Mac OS X v10.6.7 or later

 

[haravikk]

If you don't want to see drives in the sidebar, go to Finder > Preferences > Sidebar and uncheck whatever you don't want to see.

Erm… not to be rude but you've completely missed the point of this thread. It's not that we don't want to see drives in the sidebar, but that a drive keeps reappearing under favourites even though it wasn't placed there.

If it's removed from favourites then relaunching the Finder (manually or via a restart), mounting a disk image or connecting a drive all cause it to reappear.

Hiding drives won't help, as then it'd be more difficult for me to get at my drives, and the drive would probably still manage to worm its way back into the favourites

 

[GGJstudios]

It's not that we don't want to see drives in the sidebar, but that a drive keeps reappearing under favourites even though it wasn't placed there.

If it's removed from favourites then relaunching the Finder (manually or via a restart), mounting a disk image or connecting a drive all cause it to reappear.

By default, if you have hard drives checked in Finder sidebar preferences, mounting a drive will cause it to appear, even if you previously removed it. Are you using Dropbox? If so, read the earlier comments about it.

 

[Simplicated]

I had the same problem. The Dropbox folder is in my Home folder. The Macintosh HD kept appearing under the Favorites section, not the Devices section.

I tried dragging it off with Cmd-drag, but it reappeared upon relaunching Finder or rebooting.

I eventually fixed it by removing com.apple.sidebarlists.plist. I still have no idea what caused it. It just happened.

 

[haravikk]

By default, if you have hard drives checked in Finder sidebar preferences, mounting a drive will cause it to appear, even if you previously removed it. Are you using Dropbox? If so, read the earlier comments about it.

I've already read the comments earlier; I made one of them

What you're not understanding is that we're talking about drives appearing in the Favourites section of the sidebar; of course they appear in the Devices section as that's where they're supposed to go, but that's not what we're having trouble with.


The solution of dragging the item out while holding Command doesn't work, which is why I was replying to MBP Newbie as I don't understand how that's been helpful, unless they came here searching for a solution for a different problem entirely, such as simply how to remove Favourites once you've put them there. But that's not the problem that this thread is about

I eventually fixed it by removing com.apple.sidebarlists.plist. I still have no idea what caused it

And the problem hasn't resurfaced? I've already tried that to no effect.
In my particular setup I have two drives, one for Mac OS and one for Files. My DropBox folder is on the Files drive, which is what keeps appearing in my Favourites list, very annoying.

 

[GGJstudios]

The solution of dragging the item out while holding Command doesn't work, which is why I was replying to MBP Newbie as I don't understand how that's been helpful, unless they came here searching for a solution for a different problem entirely, such as simply how to remove Favourites once you've put them there. But that's not the problem that this thread is about

That solution was posted for MBP Newbie, who was, indeed, talking about the latter issue. For the other issue, if you haven't seen it already, this thread may be helpful:

2nd disk keeps appearing in Favorites in Finder sidebar