I just noticed some strange behavior moving some folders of images off of a Macbook onto an ExFAT formatted SD card. The folder appeared to have been moved off the source folder on the Macbook’s SSD card and transferred to the SD card, however the folder in the destination folder on the SD card shows up greyed out on Finder and I cannot open it.
Look at the image below, for folder date 2024-12-30 I had made 2 additional copies. copy 2 I used drag and drop while holding the command key down to initiate a move operation in Finder with the mouse. It was removed from the source folder import and moved to the destination folder txf_from_mac. Notice how in Finder the folder is greyed out and without a tree collapsible widget to expand the folder.
Notice how with the first copy which I copy and pasted to txf_from_mac, the folder did copy over and is openable and can be expanded to see the folder content.
The folder copy 2 however can be right clicked to view the Get Info panel on the folder, which shows the folder as having Zero KB. Here is a side by side of the Get Info presentation for each folder in the destination drive
There seems to be a mismatch for the capacity on disk whereas the Size attribute is interestingly enough identical for both folders. This behavior has reproduced for two different ExFAT devices, one an SD card, and another a USB thumb drive.
Is this a known bug in MacOS (I’m running Sequoia 15.5 (24F74))? What could account for this behavior?
sidenote probing around the folders in terminal the folder does appear navigable, and I can even copy the file to another folder and open it and find no difference in the image.
userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/'
2024-12-30 () copy 2024-12-30 () copy 2
userX@MacBookPro ~ % find '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/'
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/._IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy/IMG_7302.JPG
/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy/._IMG_7302.JPG
userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2'
total 11264
drwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 131072 Jun 1 23:11 .
-rwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 4096 Jun 1 23:11 ._IMG_7302.JPG
drwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 131072 Jun 1 23:11 ..
-rwx------@ 1 userX 1950283502 5267537 Jun 1 23:11 IMG_7302.JPG
userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy'
total 11264
drwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 131072 Jun 1 23:06 .
-rwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 4096 Jun 1 23:15 ._IMG_7302.JPG
drwx------ 1 userX 1950283502 131072 Jun 1 23:11 ..
-rwx------@ 1 userX 1950283502 5267537 Dec 30 14:07 IMG_7302.JPG
userX@MacBookPro ~ % cp '/Volumes/A/txf_from_mac/2024-12-30 () copy 2/IMG_7302.JPG' ~
userX@MacBookPro ~ % ls -la ~/IMG_7302.JPG
-rwx------@ 1 userX staff 5267537 Jun 1 23:50 /Users/userX/IMG_7302.JPG
some additional context, after attempting to clean up my experiment by deleting the folders in txf_from_mac I hit an in use error
Some of the items you are moving are in use by another application. Moving the items can cause problems with the application using them. Are you sure you want to move these items?
I tried to see if anything came up with an lsof command, grep filtered to some of the folder name (eg 2024-12-30 or "copy 2" but nothing came back. Clicking Continue did manage to successfully delete the folder however. The other folder in the destination folder deleted without issue.
