Mac OS Finder - weird behaviour with SMB Shares

titust wrote:

My point was the following: It is unacceptable that simply deleting a few files and folders from an SMB share to be impossible on a Mac and piece of cake on Windows... There is something rotten here

In short, I wouldn't recommend using a Mac to access a network volume.

That's a valid point for you, but what makes you think it's Apple and not your setup? I have no problems whatsoever deleting a few files and/or folders from an NAS connected through SMB. Works just fine on my personal Mac with my home NAS, and on my work Mac with my company NAS. On the work NAS, when an employee leaves I archive their lab data to cloud storage and delete their folder from the NAS, from my Mac, and in some cases thousands of image files comprising 1-2 TB or more, in Finder, and it takes moments to execute.

If one system is working properly and another system is not, typically the problem is not the OS, it's the user's configuration. Point being, the problem should be solvable.

titust wrote:

Maybe it's an older problem but I just ran into.

It sounds about what I would expect based on the last time I had access to an SMB server circa 2017.

I have a SMB share on a NAS that can be accessed both by my Mac as well as by Windows. If I share it on my Mac and I want to delete a large folder with many files inside (for example a copy of my Mac home folder that I temporarily backed up on that share) the finder takes for ever more (than 24h), and eventually finishes by crashing and does not do much deletion.

If I map the same share on Windows deleting the same folder it takes less than 5 minutes. 

I find this behaviour totally ridiculous from the OS is are not able to deal with SMB shares.

I know I can eventually use the terminal to do the same thing, but should I? Why do we have the Finder for?

You're asking the wrong questions.

You should have asked if it was a good idea to copy your entire Mac home folder to an SMB share. Had you done that, the answer would have been a resounding "no", thereby avoiding this issue.

Now, you have a folder on your SMB share full of files that are likely useless to Windows and probably inaccessible and unusable on the Mac. I recommend you delete it by whatever the most efficient method might be. I'm sure that the least efficient method would be via macOS. I actually think using Finder would be better because it would just merely crash Finder. If you used Terminal, the crash would be deeper into the file system/networking layer and much more difficult to resolve. It might leave the server itself in a bad state.

In short, I wouldn't recommend using a Mac to access a network volume. In my experience circa 2017, we had a whole team of very good admin people, absolute, top-of-the-line servers and network gear, and literally unlimited funding. Couldn't make it work. Merely opening a Finder window on a folder with lots of images would trigger a Quicklook cascade that would crash the Finder. Actually attempting to edit a document on the server was guaranteed corruption. I was able to limit the corruption by maintaining local backups and limiting most users other than myself to read-only on the network.

It was little more than a glorified FTP server. I had to download documents, edit them locally, and then copy them back to the server. But at least back then, with our Active Directory network, I could use auto mount to easily connect to the network when needed. But Apple dropped support for that and even deleted the one (1) document explaining how to do it.

Instead, I recommend some kind of document management system like Atlassian Confluence. We had that in 2017 too and it worked great. If you want real-time collaboration, use Google Docs or similar. I would love to be able to recommend an Apple solution, but this just isn't anything that Apple values. And to be honest, it isn't 1999 anymore. One successful phishing click and your network is gone and encrypted behind a malicious crypto-paywall. And that won't be the fault of any Apple product I guarantee.

etresoft wrote:

In my experience circa 2017, we had a whole team of very good admin people, absolute, top-of-the-line servers and network gear, and literally unlimited funding. Couldn't make it work. Merely opening a Finder window on a folder with lots of images would trigger a Quicklook cascade that would crash the Finder. Actually attempting to edit a document on the server was guaranteed corruption.

I think things have improved since 2017. I connect via SMB to a large QNAP NAS (16-bay, 80 TB) used to store lab data, and have no problem opening and flipping through folders filled with tiff images (we do a lot of microscopy). My home NAS is a much smaller Synology NAS that several family members connect to via SMB without issue.

neuroanatomist wrote:

I think things have improved since 2017. I connect via SMB to a large QNAP NAS (16-bay, 80 TB) used to store lab data, and have no problem opening and flipping through folders filled with tiff images (we do a lot of microscopy). My home NAS is a much smaller Synology NAS that several family members connect to via SMB without issue.

Well, 2017 wasn't exactly 𝒴ℯ 𝒪𝓁𝒹ℯ𝓃 𝒯𝓎𝓂ℯ𝓈. If you know of some secret setting to enable circa 1997 expectations of networking performance and reliability, people would love to know what it is.

etresoft wrote:

Well, 2017 wasn't exactly 𝒴ℯ 𝒪𝓁𝒹ℯ𝓃 𝒯𝓎𝓂ℯ𝓈. If you know of some secret setting to enable circa 1997 expectations of networking performance and reliability, people would love to know what it is.

I was simply responding to your comment about your experience with SMB networking being circa 2017. Having said that, I used networked shared drives via SMB back then too, and they worked. Sometimes the whole team of very good admin people come up short, or perhaps they were trying to implement something more complicated. I've been in small companies (<50 people) since 2016, have used Macs in blended PC/Mac environments, and have used network shared drives without issues. Actually, prior to 2016 I recall those things not being nearly as smooth, and those were in large (Fortune 100) companies with, as you put it, 'teams of very good admin people, absolute, top-of-the-line servers and network gear, and [practically] unlimited funding'.

But big organizations often think they're the best at something when they aren't, such as when the executive team of one of those Fortune 100 companies was meeting with another executive team and explaining how our company knew more about getting clinical trial material to clinical testing sites because we were a major Pharma company...when the other company was UPS. Somehow, I think UPS knows quite a bit about getting boxes of stuff from point A to point B.

titust wrote:

This statement of yours does not honor Apple at all. It's absurd

Didn't know that honouring Apple was part of the job description. I've always thought it was better to tell people the truth as I understand it, relate my own similar experiences, and offer suggestions for a better experience in the future. But that's the wrong approach? I should be concerned with Apple's honour instead?

Right there with you on that second part though.

neuroanatomist wrote:

I was simply responding to your comment about your experience with SMB networking being circa 2017. Having said that, I used networked shared drives via SMB back then too, and they worked.

But that was my point. They worked at this place too. It was the Mac that didn't.

I have plenty of funny work stories too - lots of well-paid people and household name companies that should have known better, but somehow didn't. This wasn't one of those situations. This place certainly had a lot of problems, but the network wasn't one of them. The network ran great. They had petabytes of data. It was the Mac that had to be restarted. It was the files opened by Macs that got corrupted.

There are certainly lots of reasons to prefer using a Mac. I sure wouldn't want to use Windows. But when someone is reporting problems that seem very similar to what I experienced, I'm going to recommend what I think is the best course of action. You're welcome to offer your own suggestions. Just make sure they're honourable. 😄

Very relevant, and I guess I'm fortunate that my experience differed. I've mostly used Macs in the corporate world, except for one 6-year purgatory before one of those large Pharma companies started a Mac pilot program. During those 6 years, I went through 5 company issues Windows laptops but kept my personal Mac (a 2006 17" Core Duo MBP) for that period and longer. I guess that's honorable to Apple but not to HP/Lenovo (but that's probably 'ok' here, lol).