Thursday, December 12, 2019

Macintosh - Box Drive causes Finder to go to Not Responding for 5+ minutes

I recently ran into this issue with a user who upgraded to MacOS Catalina.  This user stores much of their data in Box Drive and uses it regularly.  After they upgraded to Catalina, anytime they clicked the 'Box' folder in Finder, Finder would stop responding for a long time.  Eventually, it responds and he can use it.

I did much troubleshooting trying to find what was causing this issue. I didn't find anything online that was helpful.  I uninstalled and reinstalled Box Drive, which did not help.  One test I conducted that was helpful; I logged on with my profile and accessed my Box drive.  It worked fine.  That told me this was most likely due to something in the user's profile.

I used Activity Monitor to explore the 'Open Files and Processes' associated with the Box process.  I recorded the output in the box to get the different paths where it stores and uses data.

To make this post short, if you run into this issue, you can try the following steps:

  1. First, make sure Box is not running.  You can end the process from Activity Monitor if needed.
  2. Rename this folder (replace <username> with their username)  /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Box to /Users/<username>/Library/Application Support/Box.bak
  3. Open Box and see if it works normally now.


New beginner's guide to PowerShell on my GitHub page

 I created a beginner's guide to PowerShell here: https://github.com/aamjohns/Powershell_Guide/blob/main/README.md I hope it helps someo...