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Is there a way to backup my finder sidebar "Favorites" on the left with all my shortcuts to folders on our network drive?
Is this sidebar stored in a file somewhere that I can backup?

Every once in a while the whole sidebar is messed up, so all network folders are gone or the name is just a ? instead of the real folder name.

If there are many folders it takes way too long to restore all of that by hand (and also I can't remember all those folders until I need it and notice that it's missing).

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4 Answers 4

Reset to default
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The sidebar will forget those mounted network aliases every time it can't find one.

The 'fix', although a bit clunky, is to mount the remote drives, directly alias them on the desktop, then move the aliases somewhere permanent.
Then they never break.

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  • I'm not sure what I should do now. This fixes the problem, thank you. But the original question was to back it up in a file. Because I'm relatively new to stackexchange I don't know if it's correct to resolve this as the correct answer
    – jona
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 9:43
  • You could consider it a "frame challenge", a 'how about if you did it this way instead?'. You can accept whichever you like - whichever helped the most, if you want to think of it that way. [I won't be offended if you choose the other answer;))
    – Tetsujin
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 10:12
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You can backup file in

~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl2

restore this file need to login out.

I test in 10.14.6 ok

Update - 2024-08-01

This also worked to migrate Finder favorites across major macOS releases.

I copied ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl2 from macOS monterey to macOS Sequoia.

Note that in Monterey, the file format/extension is sfl2 vs sfl3 in Sequoia.

Steps:

  1. Copy ~/Library/Application\ Support/com.apple.sharedfilelist/com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl2 from source macOS to destination.

  2. If destination already has a file with the same name, replace it and skip to step 4

  3. If destination has a file with the same basename and a different extension (e.g. com.apple.LSSharedFileList.FavoriteItems.sfl3), delete this file. The file in the old format (sfl2) will automatically be migrated after the next step.

  4. Logout and log back in.

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  • Thank you. This still works for macOS 15. I was able to migrate my favorites from macOS monterey to macOS15 and after a logout and login, the favorites appeared.
    – Ashutosh Jindal
    Commented Aug 1 at 9:36
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There are two plist files in the Library that have all the finder settings.

The files are located at ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.sidebarlists.plist and ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist

You can open one by copying the path, opening finder, click on go, then go to folder and paste the path in there. This way you can create and restore a backup of the sidebar.

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  • The files are there, but if I backup that file, delete something in my sidebar and put the file back it won't restore the sidebar.
    – jona
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 9:42
  • After you restore the file you have to log out and log in again for the changes to take effect. A restart also works.
    – Ant
    Commented Jun 30, 2021 at 11:42
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It may be better to use alternate methods of 'saving' network shares as aliases in the Finder, e.g. on the Desktop (or better, in a sub-folder of the Desktop to keep things tidy!); or in the Dock.

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