How to remove multiple entries for drives from the Finder sidebar
After updating to macOS Sonoma 14.7.4 and possibly even before that, I got multiple entries for the one and only "Macintosh HD" in the Finder sidebar. I was able to switch drives off in Finder preferences, but nothing I tried so far removed the unwanted entries.
A new user account did not show the multiplications, but I was able to create them by manually adding the drive to the sidebar and switching disk display off and on again in Finder preferences. According to a support person I talked to, this was a known bug of later versions of macOS Sonoma and the only fix I could officially get was to upgrade to macOS Sequoia. I did that with a separate volume and found that the duplicates did not go away.
Finally, I was able to fix the issue by doing the following (read all before starting):
- Back up your Mac with Time Machine (or any other SW you might use)
- Direct the Finder to /Users/youraccountname/Library/Application Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/ (see below)
- Delete the file com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteVolumes.sfl3 - but leave other files alone!
- Delete the content of /Users/youraccountname/Library/Caches/
- Log out of the user account
- Restart the Mac
Notes:
- These steps restart the "Launch Services" and the missing "...Volumes" file sets things to normal. While this procedure cures the symptoms of the bug, the bug itself remains. This means that entries can multiply again.
- On my Mac, more than one "...Volume" file existed with different file suffices - and I deleted all of them.
AGAIN
- Make sure you have a recent backup for fallback, should anything go wrong.