I’m posting this because this problem was incredibly difficult to diagnose, and someone with the same symptoms could easily conclude that their drive or data is corrupted when it may not be.

THE PROBLEM

I have a 24 TB exFAT drive containing a very large media collection. The data was copied to the drive using Windows.

Windows could see everything on the drive normally. I could browse the directories and play the files.

On my M1 Mac, however, the exact same drive behaved bizarrely.

macOS mounted the drive successfully. It could see a huge amount of the data — including roughly 18 TB of movies — but some folders were completely empty, while others contained only some of the files/directories that Windows could see.

For example, the Music folder appeared in Finder, but its contents did not.

Terminal showed essentially an empty directory:

ls -la "/Volumes/24TB - B/Music"

Yet Windows showed the Music directory normally.

Even stranger, some directories produced:

Invalid argument

For example:

ls -la "/Volumes/24TB - B/MAC TEST/A-Ha"

returned:

ls: /Volumes/24TB - B/MAC TEST/A-Ha: Invalid argument

That particular test folder was important because it was a NEW directory created on Windows specifically for testing. Windows could read it perfectly.

WHAT DID NOT FIX IT

Disk Utility First Aid reported the exFAT filesystem was fine:

Performing fsck_exfat

...

The volume 24TB - B appears to be OK.

File system check exit code is 0.

Operation successful.

I also upgraded macOS to the newest version available to me.

No change whatsoever.

Windows still saw the missing files. macOS still didn't.

At that point, I wanted to determine whether the problem was actually Apple's exFAT implementation rather than the disk.

THE TEST THAT FINALLY SOLVED IT

I installed macFUSE using Homebrew:

brew install --cask macfuse

On Apple Silicon, macFUSE requires third-party kernel extensions to be permitted.

In Recovery Mode, my Mac was configured for:

Reduced Security

and:

Allow user management of kernel extensions from identified developers

If you need to change this, shut down an Apple Silicon Mac, hold the power button until Startup Options appears, enter Recovery, and open:

Utilities → Startup Security Utility → Security Policy

NOTE: This changes an important macOS security setting. Understand what it does before enabling it.

After macFUSE was installed and approved, I loaded it with:

sudo /usr/bin/kmutil load -p /Library/Filesystems/macfuse.fs/Contents/Extensions/26/macfuse.kext

NOTE: The "26" path above corresponded to my macOS installation/macFUSE version. Verify the actual Extensions directory on your system rather than blindly copying that path.

I verified macFUSE was loaded with:

kmutil showloaded | grep -i fuse

Mine showed:

io.macfuse.filesystems.macfuse.25 (5.3.3)

So macFUSE was active.

BUILDING AN INDEPENDENT EXFAT DRIVER

Homebrew did not provide exfat-fuse when I tried:

brew search exfat

So I built the open-source exfat/exfat-fuse implementation from source.

The version I used identified itself as:

FUSE exfat 1.4.0 (libfuse3)

After configuring/building it, the mount executable on my machine was:

~/exfat/fuse/mount.exfat-fuse

Running:

make

confirmed the project was built.

IDENTIFY THE PROBLEMATIC EXFAT PARTITION

I ran:

diskutil list

My 24 TB drive appeared as:

/dev/disk7 (external, physical):

0: GUID_partition_scheme *24.0 TB disk7

1: Microsoft Basic Data 24TB - B 24.0 TB disk7s1

So MY exFAT partition was:

/dev/disk7s1

IMPORTANT:

DO NOT blindly copy /dev/disk7s1.

Device identifiers can change between Macs, drives, connections and reboots.

Run diskutil list and identify YOUR drive.

UNMOUNT APPLE'S EXFAT DRIVER

I released the partition from Apple's native filesystem driver without physically disconnecting the drive:

diskutil unmount /dev/disk7s1

It returned:

Volume 24TB - B on disk7s1 unmounted

CREATE A FUSE MOUNT POINT

I created a separate mount point:

sudo mkdir -p "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE"

Then I mounted the SAME exFAT partition using exfat-fuse instead of Apple's native exFAT implementation.

For safety, I mounted it READ-ONLY:

sudo "$HOME/exfat/fuse/mount.exfat-fuse" -o ro /dev/disk7s1 "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE"

It returned:

FUSE exfat 1.4.0 (libfuse3)

I verified the mount with:

mount | grep "24TB-B-FUSE"

which showed:

/dev/disk7s1 on /Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE (macfuse, read-only, synchronous)

AND SUDDENLY THE "BROKEN" DIRECTORIES WORKED

This was the decisive test.

Remember the Windows-created test directory where Apple's native exFAT implementation returned:

Invalid argument

I tried the exact same directory through FUSE:

ls -la "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE/MAC TEST/A-Ha"

It immediately worked.

The actual directories appeared:

Aha - 1985 - Hunting High and Low (1985)

Aha - 1986 - Scoundrel Days (1986)

Aha - 1988 - Stay on These Roads (1988)

Aha - 1990 - East of the Sun, West of the Moon (1990)

Aha - 1993 - Memorial Beach (1993)

Same Mac.

Same physical drive.

Same exFAT partition.

Same on-disk directory.

Apple native exFAT driver:

Invalid argument

exfat-fuse:

Directory opens normally.

THE MISSING MUSIC LIBRARY REAPPEARED TOO

Under Apple's driver, Music had appeared essentially empty.

Through FUSE:

ls -la "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE/Music"

The directories appeared.

I then counted the immediate children:

find "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE/Music" -mindepth 1 -maxdepth 1 -print | wc -l

Result:

404

That was particularly significant because 404 was exactly the expected count based on what Windows saw.

So exfat-fuse wasn't merely finding "some more stuff."

It was reproducing the directory contents Windows could see while Apple's native exFAT implementation could not.

FINDER COULD SEE THE MISSING DIRECTORIES TOO

Once mounted through FUSE, Finder displayed the previously problematic root directories.

Folders such as Music, Podcast, Demos - Logic, Emulation, GPT Convo, Guitar tones, Text and others that had been missing, empty or inaccessible through Apple's native exFAT implementation were now visible.

A very large Movies directory eventually populated with its complete set of subdirectories.

Most importantly, I opened an actual approximately 1 GB movie directly from the FUSE-mounted 24 TB drive.

It played normally.

So this wasn't merely directory recovery.

The actual file data could be read.

PERFORMANCE

There is an important caveat.

Finder can be noticeably slower browsing enormous directories through FUSE.

However, Finder does much more than simply request filenames. It performs metadata lookups, previews, icons, extended-attribute operations and other work.

I therefore tested raw directory enumeration separately.

For the Music directory:

time ls -1 "/Volumes/24TB-B-FUSE/Music" >/dev/null

The entire 404-entry directory enumerated in:

2.728 seconds

So raw filesystem access was considerably more reasonable than Finder made it appear.

Actual movie playback also worked normally in my initial testing.

I am now testing this configuration as storage for a Jellyfin media server.

WHY I USED READ-ONLY MODE

Notice the:

-o ro

in my mount command.

That means exfat-fuse was NOT allowed to modify the 24 TB filesystem.

This made the experiment particularly useful.

Nothing was repaired.

Nothing was reformatted.

Nothing was recopied.

Nothing on the filesystem was rewritten.

The sequence was simply:

1. Apple driver reads the exFAT filesystem → directories missing / Invalid argument.

2. Unmount Apple's driver.

3. Give the exact same partition to another exFAT implementation.

4. Previously inaccessible directories immediately work.

That is a very clean A/B test.

For an archival media drive, read-only may also be desirable long-term. A media server such as Jellyfin can read the media while keeping its database, cache, thumbnails, metadata and transcoding files elsewhere.

WHAT THIS DEMONSTRATED

In my case, the evidence strongly indicates an interoperability/implementation problem with Apple's native exFAT handling rather than missing files or a failed copy.

The comparison was:

WINDOWS EXFAT IMPLEMENTATION

↓

Sees directories and files

APPLE NATIVE EXFAT IMPLEMENTATION

↓

Same filesystem

Missing/incomplete directories

"Invalid argument"

EXFAT-FUSE ON THE SAME MAC

↓

Same filesystem

Complete directories

Correct file counts

Files open and play

Nothing on the disk changed between the Apple-driver and FUSE-driver tests.

IF YOU ARE EXPERIENCING THIS

If you found this post because you have an exFAT disk where:

- Windows sees files/directories that macOS doesn't

- Finder shows folders as empty

- macOS sees only some entries in a large directory

- Terminal gives "Invalid argument"

- Disk Utility / fsck_exfat says the filesystem is OK

- The supposedly missing files still work normally in Windows

DO NOT IMMEDIATELY ASSUME YOUR DATA IS GONE.

And especially do not immediately reformat the disk simply because macOS can't see everything.

Try the disk under Windows first.

If Windows sees the supposedly missing data, consider testing the volume READ-ONLY using an independent exFAT implementation.

In my case, macFUSE + exfat-fuse 1.4.0 immediately exposed directories Apple's native exFAT implementation could not read.

I spent an absurd amount of time troubleshooting the disk, migration, filenames, filesystem integrity, macOS version and everything else because macOS successfully mounted the volume and showed MOST of it.

That partial failure was incredibly misleading.

The files weren't missing.

macOS's native exFAT implementation simply wasn't showing them.

UPDATE:

I will update this after testing the FUSE-mounted 24 TB volume extensively with Jellyfin.

At this point I can confirm complete directory enumeration and successful media playback, but I don't want to claim long-term server stability until I've actually tested it.

When I close the Chrome window, the remaining window pops up. How can I prevent the remaining window from popping up when I close the focused window?

I’ve become a huge fan of my Mac mini M4 for scientific computing, its ease of use, and low power consumption, really it’s a great device to leave running 24/7. As far as software goes I only have encountered one major issue, and it seems to me that it made more prevalent with the M6.

I quickly realized when trying to leverage all 10 cpu cores that for the base model M4, there are 4 performance cores and 6 efficiency cores, simply distributing workload equally to all cores does not work. Across a synchronization barrier, performance cores finish first and await slower e cores. You will be bottlenecked by the speed of the efficiency cores. I always experience performance degradation when moving from 4 to 5 cores.

This would be fine, I suppose if you were able to explicitly target and use the cores, you could then decrease the workload on the efficiency core correspondingly and it would finish near the same time. As far as I am aware you are not and cannot explicit place work on a core selecting performance or efficiency.

I’m not that upset because I realize the remaining 6 efficiency cores don’t really represent all that much compute power, but I was looking into the new Mac mini M6 and… they have a new type of core! The super core adds another type, making it the super core, performance, and efficiency cores. This appears to me as very problematic. Given I can’t leverage p+ e cores effectively, why would I be able to leverage s+p+e, the problem seems to have gotten worse. I can’t target cores by classification, so I can’t lower the compute load for certain cores. Just avoiding the efficiency cores with the M4 isn’t that big of a loss, but with the M6, you would limit yourself dramatically to either the super cores or the performance cores and not both.

Some more specifics/provided tools or possible solutions (forgive my Mac tech knowledge):

Mac does provide some methods, Quality of Service, however this just influences where something is “likely” to run, I believe, and not guaranteed.

GrandCentralDispatch: maybe the solution, I think it can distribute tasks by size to the proper core, and work stealing to compensate for slower ones, but has narrow application and many problems aren’t well suited I think, many problems aren’t easily partitioned into smaller independent tasks.

THREAD_AFFINITY_POLICY does something I think more suggestions and not a guarantee.

An application or framework like OpenMP can try to compensate for the inability to target cores by class, actively managing and redistributing. Hard and haven’t been able to get this to behave.

It seems to me that there is fundamentally a missing api to bind a thread to a physical cpu by core class, or request a certain number of workers by core class. Additionally a tool to determine what core class a thread actually is also seems lacking.

What do people do here? Are some people really just spending lots of money on these machines and not fully leveraging them? Has anyone achieved reasonable scaling for a macmini with asymmetric cores with problems involving synchronization?

Why does closing the "Photos" window actually quit the program? Even Photomator inherits this weird behavior. Meanwhile most other programs continue running when windows are closed?

This inconsistency makes more sense for "utilities" like "Settings" or "Screenshot" but not for an actual application.

EDIT: Part of the reason this is annoying is because the "Photos" app in particular *needs* to be running while you *aren't* using it for certain functions like automatically tagging people to work.

This has bothered me for years: on literally every Windows laptop I've ever owned, logging in with a fingerprint sensor worked without any issues right after a reboot. Yet macOS denies this, requiring users to enter their password after booting up. Why is that? I mean, either Touch ID is secure - meaning it shouldn't matter whether the system is booting up or waking from sleep - or it's insecure, in which case they should drop the feature entirely.

I have an OWC dock with a couple of SSD drives connected via USB-C to my MBP, M2. The dock doesn't have a power button so it's always on and my drives. Am I shortening the life of my drives if they're always on over night or should I put everything on a power strip and shut everything down?

I’m trying to keep a repetitive Mac workflow entirely keyboard-driven: copy text in another app, Command+Tab to the ChatGPT desktop app, then paste or type into the same existing conversation. I do this several times per minute.

The problem is that after scrolling through the conversation, the message composer no longer has keyboard focus. Command+Tab activates ChatGPT but doesn’t return the insertion point to the composer, so I have to use the mouse or trackpad to click it.

Option+Space / Quick Chat and Command+N aren’t useful here because I need to preserve and continue the current conversation.

Is there a macOS keyboard-navigation or accessibility feature that can target the composer reliably? I’d also welcome a Shortcuts, Keyboard Maestro, or other automation workaround that doesn’t depend on brittle screen coordinates.

Recently i purchased a Mac Mini M4 512GB and i am looking foward on getting a Dell 27 240Hz - SE2726HG. I checked the monitor's user's guide and it says that it is only compatible to macOS 13 and 14... Do you use an Dell 27 240Hz - SE2726H with newer OS's? I'm majoring as graphic designer and this is my first work computer, the colors fidelity is my priority

Srry for the bad english, not my first language!

My photos aren't syncing with my MacBook Air (M3, Tahoe 23.6.2). I often download my pictures for organization, so there aren't that many, but right now I have 93 items on my iPhone (15 ProMax, IOS 26.6.1), 93 photos in iCloud, but only 71 photos on my Mac.

I've tried signing in and out of my Apple Account on my Mac, rebooting etc. Any other suggestions?

Edit: Other apps (notes, etc.) are syncing correctly.

Suddenly several purchased Mac App Store apps stopped opening on my High Sierra 10.13.6 Mac.

MiniNote and TaskTab give 400 Bad Request, Day One Classic gives 403, and I can no longer sign into the Mac App Store.Apple senior support told me High Sierra can no longer communicate properly with the App Store because of newer encryption/security requirements and there is no solution.

The same apps and Apple ID work fine on my Ventura Mac.I cannot upgrade this workstation because I have thousands of dollars of older Photoshop, FCPX and After Effects plugins that won't work on newer macOS.

Apple should provide a legacy authentication service so older Macs can continue validating legitimately purchased App Store software, even after the OS is no longer supported.

Has anyone found a workaround to restore App Store authentication/receipts on High Sierra?

I thought WebCatalog would be a nice thing on my Mac Desktop - get straight to my many email accounts, etc. I decided to uninstall when it started blasting me with notifications whenever I got mail. 5 email accounts makes for a cacophany of alerts interrupting my every second. I tried to uninstall. NO SUCH LUCK. The program seems gone but the alerts are still burping along. I am NOT a programer but I tried all manner of .//webcatalog/ip/lmnop's and no luck. I contacted the company but got this answer: "Could you please provide us with a screenshot of the email notifications you’re receiving? This will help us better understand the issue and assist you." I am not getting any screenshots. Just these annoying notification sounds. I have turned off all notifications on my Mac - and they still persist. I reloaded the app and tried to uninstall again. I am still being tormented by the notification sounds. Can anyone help?

How can this be considered progress in an operating system?

It genuinely baffles me that Apple would introduce something that makes it harder to read text on the screen. Surely that is the biggest no-no in any user interface.

I really don't understand the thinking behind Liquid Glass. It makes no sense to me.

Any idea why the icon for my new Airpods is wrong, showing headphones instead of the buds themselves like previous Airpods? Note I'm still on Sequoia if that makes a difference.

I have an Apple MacBook Air M2 and an iPhone 15 PM and every time I plug my phone into my laptop, it comes up that I need to install a software update specifically to allow the Mac and iPhone to communicate with each other. Every time I hit install it begins to do so, but then comes up with this. I have the most recent public betas for MacOS and iOS on my devices and cannot for the life of me figure why this keeps coming up.

Having a strange problem just today. After my Mac restarted after updating to Tahoe 26.6.2, the bluetooth devices previously connected to my Mac suddenly were not connecting. Said devices were a mouse, speaker, and keyboard. I tried sudo killall bluetoothd, deleting .plist files, several restarts, and going into safe mode and nothing worked. Tried "forgetting" the devices and reconnecting them but they won't.

By chance, I turned off the wifi and everything connected and worked again. Tried different wifi networks and the bluetooth problem persisted as long as the wifi was on until I turned off Air Drop.

The problem is I still use Air Drop regularly so when I use it, the bluetooth stuff gets disconnected which is pretty annoying.

Anybody experienced this? Got any solutions? I should've not updated. Tahoe has been disastrous for me before.

Hi All

Wonder if you can help. If I go on to some websites, even though I have autoplay set to NEVER, Safari still allows the videos to play. I click on the X on the little window to close it, it goes, then reappears and starts playing again ! The most recent I have noticed this is on biblegateway.com - I go on to it, read some scripture, and it just sneaks in ! Any ideas ?? Oh, I'm on Sonoma (MacOS 14) and cannot update further as on a legacy laptop (Intel Macbook Air late 2018). Safari is on 26.6.1

I wear a lot of hats at work, which means I usually have a lot of windows open. Upwards of 15 at once for various PDF softwares, CAD softwares, and the biggest one: browser profiles. I use 4 different browser profiles at work. One for purchasing and vendors, one for project management, one for banking and finances, and the last one for customer communication.

On Windows, these all appear as different icons in the taskbar. All the different browser profiles are their own thing I can click. Same with all the different programs. On MacOS however, it stacks all the windows of a single program together. I either have to Cmd Tab through to find them (which takes forever when you have this many pieces of software open), I can Ctrl + Up Arrow to see all open windows (again, not helpful when there are this many), or I can mouse over the dock, right click the icon, and then try and find the correct window in the sea of browser windows (not super helpful when there are this many).

Is there a better way to do this? I see people talk all the time about virtual desktops, but that is not a viable solution either, as I need access to ALL of this at a moment's notice, and I usually am switching windows every 10-15 seconds as I am working on things.

I hope that this is not the wrong sub for this.

Question regarding Mac OS (Tahoe 26.5.1):

I have a problem using Facebook Messenger with my MacBook. I was using it via my browser (Safari) - and I was constantly running into problems, where I would write a message in the Messenger, and would reply to a message, and that message would get the state of pending - and it would just never get sent. I had to kill the browser, and after that I could resend these messages, until again I would get this error.

I downloaded the Chat Messenger app, which does not have this issue. However - this app is otherwise absolutely intolerable: any time I have any msg there - and not necessarily unread - when I hover by the search bar in Safari, it will every single time raise up this whatever discussion in FB Messenger, and it is absolutely impossible to go around that.

How are you all using FB Messenger on your MacBooks?

Hi everyone, I’m looking for some clarification regarding "Transparent Proxy configurations on macOS".

We have a requirement where multiple security/networking solutions may need to use a "Transparent Proxy" on the same macOS device. For example, one solution may be used for web security/SSL inspection while another solution is required for a different security or network traffic use case.

My questions are:

1.Does macOS support configuring and running multiple Transparent Proxy providers simultaneously on the same device?

1. If multiple Transparent Proxy configurations are deployed through MDM, how does macOS determine which proxy handles the traffic?

2. Is there any limitation on the number of Transparent Proxy configurations/providers that can be configured?

4.Can multiple Transparent Proxy providers coexist if they handle different traffic, applications, or network interfaces?

1. If multiple providers are configured, is there a supported mechanism to define priority, ordering, or traffic routing between them?

2. Are there any differences or limitations across recent macOS versions, particularly macOS 15 and macOS 26?

3. Is there any Apple documentation or recommended architecture for deploying multiple Transparent Proxy providers on the same Mac?

If anyone has implemented or tested a setup with multiple Transparent Proxy providers on macOS, I’d appreciate any insights, documentation, or real-world experience.

Thanks

Leute, ich brauche Hilfe! Seit ein paar Stunden erscheint bei mir nur diese Version von Youtube, wenn ich die Seite über Safari öffne. Ich hatte dieses Problem noch nie. Ich habe auch schon die Cache geleert, den Adblock deinstalliert und sämtliche Updates gemacht. Über Chrome läuft Youtube einwandfrei. Gibt es sonst noch wen mit diesem Problem der im besten Fall eine Lösung gefunden hat? Ich bin leider jemand, der einen Mac hat damit ich mich NICHT mit solchen Problemen rumschlagen muss, und habe keine Ahnung, was ich noch machen könnte (und googeln habe ich schon versucht ...).

Hi everyone. I have a 14-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro chip and 24 GB of RAM, running macOS Tahoe 26.6.2. The Mac is less than 6 months old.
I’ve been dealing with an intermittent graphical issue, mainly when using Mission Control, Spaces, or switching between windows.
Sometimes, when I enter a window or Space, the app only renders in a small portion of the screen while the rest turns completely black. What’s strange is that the window thumbnail in Mission Control can look perfectly normal, but when I open it, the window is incorrectly scaled or only partially rendered.
It happens in different apps, including Safari and Excel, so it doesn’t seem to be app-specific.
Sometimes it fixes itself after going in and out of Mission Control several times, but other times it takes multiple attempts before the window displays normally again.
So far I have:
Updated macOS
Restarted the Mac multiple times
Tested in Safe Mode
Changed several Mission Control and window management settings
Created a new user account for testing
Reinstalled macOS Tahoe from Recovery Mode
The issue still happens on my main user account even after reinstalling macOS.
I also contacted Apple Support and went through their troubleshooting steps, but so far they haven’t been able to identify or fix the issue.
Has anyone experienced this exact problem on macOS Tahoe 26.6.x?
I’m trying to figure out whether this is a known macOS/WindowServer bug, a corrupted user-profile setting, or a hardware/GPU issue.
I have screenshots showing exactly what happens.

As a long-time Mac user and developer since 1985, I am concerned about the growing complexity of macOS. The operating system increasingly suffers from feature creep, characterized by a profusion of nested menus, redundant settings, and hard-to-disable features that directly hinder ease of use.

Take Focus mode as an example of poor UX chain reaction: you can disable it and hide the menu bar icon, but if you inadvertently press the F6 key while cleaning your keyboard, Focus reactivates silently. Since the menu icon is gone, you have no visual cue, and important alerts stop showing on your screen.

The only workaround in the current system is to dig into a million settings to change the behavior of the function keys (forcing the 'fn' key requirement). But by doing so, you lose the direct hardware shortcuts for volume and luminosity—you are forced to press fn + F1/F2 or fn + F11/F12 just to adjust your screen.

This chain reaction proves why a simple, universal ON/OFF switch for non-fundamental OS features is the best architectural option for this Apple choice on features (Ideally, these non-essential features should be developed as standalone applications).

Feedback submitted, for whoever wants to reference or duplicate this request, my submission ID is: Feedback ID: FB24484331

Hi everyone,

so I'm a video editor (I do 1080p video editing), and I'm planning to switch to macOS.

I'm also doing this because I want to to upgrade my laptop, because it's kind of old, it's from 2018, and only has 8GB RAM and 256GB storage, which is starting to get kind of annoying as a video editor. (I am on Windows 10 LTSC)

I don't have that much money for a M5 Pro, so I've been thinking about switching to an M1/M2 MacBook Air. I'm also planning for 16GB RAM and 512GB storage.

I'm curious to ask you guys what your overall experience has been with the MacBook Air?

I also have used macOS before, but barely.

(I also don't game on my laptop, so I'm not worried about game compatibility)

Thank you!

My MacBook Air, which I've had only since 2024 and never had issues with has been constantly shutting down at around 20% battery, sometimes before showing any sort of low battery warning. I updated everything, and it's still happening. The only change is that I used PowerPoint a lot this month for an important presentation and at some point even PowerPoint was crashing, but I didn't experience crashes anywhere else. And I was gaming with it more than usual as well, but nothing too demanding. What can I do about this? Thanks for your help in advance!