Copy progress window from Finder not displaying

Question was " Copy progress window from Finder not displaying ?

Do you mean a window similar to this one in illustration below ?

I am copying a file from my documents to an external drive by doing a Drag and Drop the file Onto the External

The existing file on the external already exists , though an older version

The choices are as per below, " Keep Both, Stop, Replace "

jamessawle wrote:

I am not sure what I have done, but when copying or moving files from one finder window to another I do not see the progress bar, and now on a few occasions I have lost data because I had thought that items had been copied or moved and it had not completed.

Is there a way to get this window back?

Using a MacBook Pro with Sequoia 15.6.1

James

hard to understand the complication here...

I know of no way to force the dialog. Is this an old issue, new issue, what changed. Your macOS is current.

What you do not state— if this is a tiny file which more than likely happens so fast there will be no dialogue

or some huge GB size file is unclear.

I would do some more testing on your end. Have you shutdown and restarted the Mac(?) Did you try Safeboot mode?

The progress bar usually only appears if the copy takes some time.

You can go to the Window menu in Finder and see if there is an item there called "Copy".

It will only exist while a file copy is in progress, and that is usually very quick unless the file is very big, or there are a lot of files, or the drives are quite slow.

OP wrote " I am not sure what I have done, but when copying or moving files "

OP wrote " I have lost data because I had thought that items had been copied or moved and it had not completed. "

I think you may understand why we find this confusing

No double you are aware that to Copy ⌘ + c a file, would normally place the file on the Clipboard

Thereby making it possible to Paste ⌘ + v the file to its new location

No date loss

Where are the files in question located? If they're being moved/copied from one location on your internal SSD to another, there's typically no progress indicator. The reason is the action takes so little time that macOS does not bother displaying it because the action is complete before it would be displayed. The format used for SSDs (APFS) means there's really only one copy of any file so when you copy/paste a file, macOS just needs to create an alias to the original (yes, it shows up as a second file, but it's not and if you edit one of the copies only the changed data blocks are actually updated).

The only time you should expect to see a progress window is when you're copying files to/from an external drive, memory card, etc.

jamessawle wrote:

and now on a few occasions I have lost data because I had thought that items had been copied or moved and it had not completed.

This implies you may not have any backups.

If you don't have any backups, then before you do anything else, make sure you have frequent and regular backups since there are a lot more new ways to permanently lose access to the data stored on the internal SSD of the recent Macs due to all of the hardware, software, and security changes.

If the copy progress window in Finder isn’t displaying, try restarting Finder from the Apple menu > Force Quit > Finder > Relaunch, or reboot your Mac to refresh the process.

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