Apple Core Rot extends to all areas of macOS. See Apple Core Rot: It’s Big Things, and Hundreds of Little Ones, that Together Add up to Chaos and also Apple Quality Control: Enough is Enough.

The macOS Finder ought to be rock solid, but it is rife with bugs, some very serious. See also One more Finder File Copy Bug: Is it Even Safe to Count on the macOS Finder to Copy Files?.

The “Zero bytes” folder bug

This bug occurs on macOS 10.13.6 High Sierra and macOS 10.14.3 Mojave.

This bug does not involve using the Finder to copy files; it just exists on its own.

I just about had a heart attack when it appeared that 7TB or so of my data was gone. Observe the “Zero bytes” folders below. OMG. See the following screen shots for more. This was NOT a transient thing for a few seconds—after 10 minutes it was still wrong.

Generally if I see a zero byte folder, I just delete it out of habit. That’s a habit I have to unlearn: what if it was just one folder among many and Get Info also shows zero bytes... hard to not want to just trash the thing.

This bug is particularly severe on hard drives (because they are slow) and when there is disk I/O going on. You might wait a looooooooooong time to see any display of the size. Why can’t it just say “calculating...”? Because it eventually seems to get it right (though I”m not sure of that).

How about doing a Get Info on a folder—surely that will be done correctly, right? Wrong.

Lo and behold: the Finder shows “Zero bytes” for the folder selected above. But it actually has about 58GB in it.

The folder actually has about 58GB in it as can be seen when the folder is opened. So the Finder has all the subfolders totalled and many minutes later (or never) the parent folder might show something other than Zero bytes. Lovely.

But wait, it gets stupider and stupider: here we have an 11.91GB parent folder that contains subfolders that total 509GB or so. What a joyous set of clusterbugs.

Engineers deserve some blame

I know Apple engineers are pressed for time by calendar-driven deadlines, but sloppy work is sloppy work. In this case there is just NO EXCUSE for something this bad.

Glenn K writes:

Are your issues all on volumes using SoftRaid? If so, how do you know it isn't the issue? I have not seen any "zero byte" folders on any of my SSDs, internal or otherwise.Are your issues all on volumes using SoftRaid? If so, how do you know it isn't the issue? I have not seen any "zero byte" folders on any of my SSDs, internal or otherwise.

DIGLLOYD: let me clarify: