So Apple released another update for macOS Catalina. My iMac is now Version 10.15.5. Just like with various previous updates, my iMac gets totally screwed. Slow as ever, Finder not responding, and that damn little beach ball spinning forever.
I’ve tried searching for answers to my problem. Finder not responding. Amazingly enough, I’ve found several articles for dealing with “Mac Finder not responding” that suggest doing something with Finder. After hours of research, okay, days of research I found that my issue was in part due to the fact that I sync my files to iCloud.
I do not know what issue they experienced but when my Finder does not respond, I can not do anything with it. I do not have access to Force Quit or right click on Finder to relaunch. No clicking on buttons, no searching anywhere. The moment my iMac comes back on, the little beach ball is right there trying to one Finder.
Fortunately, because I use Terminal often to install pods in my Xcode projects, I’ve placed a shortcut to Terminal in my Dock.
I’ve tried relaunching Finder with commands in Terminal
killall Finderto relaunchsudo rm ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plistto remove the preferences file
Safari still works therefore I was able to find an answer in the Apple forum some time ago and sent myself an email with the command that actually helped solve my problem.
So long story short, I copied and pasted this into Terminal. Essentially what it does is signs you out of iCloud, recreates some corrupted files and reboots the iMac. And just like that, all my files are there on my desktop. About 5 screenshots but the fact that I can see them tells me that I once again have access to my files.
sudo -v ; killall -9 accountsd com.apple.iCloudHelper ; defaults delete MobileMeAccounts ; mkdir ~/Library/Accounts/Backup ; mv ~/Library/Accounts/.sqlite ~/Library/Accounts/Backup/ ; killall -9 accountsd com.apple.iCloudHelper ; sudo reboot