Beta 2 Finder crashing

I’m experiencing this problem too - It’s been so bad that my Mac is almost unusable. Finder is hanging most of the time with the beach ball. Tried relaunching, safe made etc. It seems to be an issue with using the Merged iCloud Desktop and Documents, as they are constantly disappearing/reappearing.

Yeah I experience the same probleam with my MBP 2018. Many applications crash beacuse of it.

I Finally gave up and wiped the drive, reinstalling Mojave. This is the first time in 10 years of testing Mac OS that I’ve had to **** away an early beta. The machine was so unstable that I could never predict when it would just freeze or when it might work. Everytime it froze, it was the Finder, even if I was inside another program. It will be awhile before I load another Catalna beta on my test machine. FWIW, it is a 2017 Retina MBP 15” with top specs.

I posted about this shortly after beta 2 was released. I narrowed down one of the issues to Iconserver. I can stabilise finder by closing (force quit) the iconserver before changing drives. That has no effect on apps though. Loading a save dialogue or using an app that hammers a drive (eg segmented FTP) will cause a crash.

I'm SO GLAD it isn't just me. I've been googling "catalina beta finder crash" for the past 2 days.. I decided it would be a great idea to update my production MBP 2019 while traveling on a business trip thinking Catalina would be as stable as the Mojave betas. Boy was I wrong! Definitely experiencing the same thing with Finder hanging and ANY application that attempts to save or open files to the drive. Holy crap is it bad!

In any case, has anyone here figured out a way to make Finder more stable until Apple releases a fix? Do any of you know if Apple is even aware of this issue? It has to be affecting every beta tester out there -- it can't just be us in this thread! I was thinking it had something to do with my mapped network drives from my NAS on my home network. Now there are comments about this possibly being related to iCloud Documents and Desktop folder?

Trying to figure out a hack to fix this until Apple acknowledges this issue and kicks out a frickin fix. Why aren't there more forum threads about this issue? This is a MAJOR problem affecting usability -- how can none of the other sites be discussing this, like Mac Rumors? ***!

Alissa Knight

I'm having the exact same problems with my Mac as well.

I waited for the Public Beta like I have always did but it essentially made my Mac unusuable.

Finder crashes, Photoshop and other apps can't be opened.

Of course this is beta and must be treated like one but this is the worst one I have seend in like 10 or more years. Sometimes patience pays off I guess 🙂

Same here, finder spins, photos spins, opening an attachment from email more spinning

So far not many users have reported it, therefore I start to believe that there is some incompatibility with some software, setting or setup.

I tested this on two separate Mac (Late 2015 iMac and 2016 MBP 15") and both have the same problem. But both have nearly 1:1 software installed and has the same setup.

I'm safe to assume that both of my Macs didn't have the same exact failure during installation or otherwise I have been very unlucky which I highly doubt. So it must be some installed software or a setting/setup. Not sure what but it sure isn't a failed installation or completely globally problem assuming how little reports there are about this problem.

Edit: Did a reinstall on iMac and still the same thing. So it is clearly not faulty installation. Just software/settings are to blame.

have exactly same problem. Catalina Beta (19A4871) finder is almost useless, so its almost impossible to open files, store, work with files etc. I have never seen such disfunction in a beta before.... its on a MacBookPro mid-2014, so maybe this problem only occurs on certain machines?

Same here on 15" MBP2018. According to console log, "fileproviderd" is crashing constanty and restarting again with the errormessage:

"*** Terminating app due to uncaught exception 'NSInvalidArgumentException', reason: '*** -[__NSPlaceholderArray initWithObjects:count:]: attempt to insert nil object"

Reported to Apple and waiting for a fix. Its the worst bug I have experrienced in a long time.

Same here. I’ve been running Xcode Beta in Catalina Beta 2, and whenever I run an operation that uses Finder, such as creating a new swiftUI file, it could take 5 minutes or longer. And Finder would hang and crash throughout the system. I booted in safe mode and the issue persisted. Then, I disabled iCloud Drive in system preferences, and removed it from the sidebar in Finder. That seems to have resolved the issue for now, I’m back to using finder and Xcode without Finder hanging (in safe mode). Disabled safe mode and booted again. I can now confirm that the solution above has completely resolved the issue. Not sure if safe mode was necessary.

I have exactly same problem. Catalina Beta (19A4871) finder is almost useless, so its almost impossible to open files, store, work with files etc. iMAC 21" 2015

I am having the exact same problem. The apps that I have installed are: Adobe Creative Suite, Dropbox, Slack, and Google Chrome. There aren't any other apps as far as I know. This does make my system largely unusable, which is surprising given how well previous macOS betas have been.

One thing I noticed is that Disk Utility shows two entries for my hard drive: one that is APFS enabled and another that isn't. Is that normal? Given that Finder is a disk-operation heavy app, these additional entries might be related to why any file-related operation fails?

I am having this problem as well. 2015 Early MBP with 19A487m.

The only app that seems to work fine is Safari, and my MBP has turned into a browser-only computer. All my desktop files are gone & I cannot open most of the apps because most of the apps seem to deal with reading/writing files which require Finder. Xcode is unusable.

Am I going to be stuck with this? I didn't use Time Machine to backup Mojav, so it is not possible to go back. I really need to do app developments.

Using 'terminal', I seem to be able to access most of the folders, but not 'Desktop', which is supposedly connected to icloud with sync. Do you guys all have enabled icloud sync for your Desktop & Documents directory? I really want to find common patterns between those of us who have this problem.

I use xcode, final cut pro, and icloud sync.

There seems to be a problem with cloud not booting properly which is causing everything else to freeze up as it keeps trying to boot over and over. Disable icloud drive in the system preferences then reboot. This totally fixed the issue for me. Phew!