findermacos
I used to have several favorites in the sidebar of the finder window, but today they are gone.
I cannot drag folders into the sidebar, and I can't display the ones available to choose from in Finder > Preferences. WTF?
Here's a little screen capture of it misbehaving:
In Terminal, run the following command. You should find the word Network mentioned at least once in your .plist preference file:
defaults read com.apple.sidebarlists | grep Network
As I can't drag Network to my Finder sidebar — and as sidebar takes a different approach to showing shared items — I guess that:
Probably easiest with Xcode.
If you don't have Xcode, then use TextWrangler or anything that's capable of editing this type of property list.
Xcode views of the property list:
A TextWrangler view:
⇧⌘K
First try removing, from the property list, unwanted or redundant items relating to Network.
A guess: it may be necessary to quit Finder, or log out, before some types of change become effective.
If following removals and a log out you find that SHARED is still without All…, consider asking a separate question.
In Finder, go to preferences, then click Sidebar. Under the Shared group, tick Connected Servers.
Best Answer
The first thing to try is to make a new user account and then see if the finder sidebar functions there.
If so, you can log out and delete that user account and then make a backup of the system. You'll want to delete the user preferences for Finder.
Then log out and back it to see if the finder sidebar is working.