Did you suddenly notice that the items you added to the Finder sidebar are suddenly missing either in the Finder or Open/Save dialogs or both? It’s not you: It’s a bug.
It’s a subtle thing, because nothing fails; rather, it dawns on you that when you’re clicking to navigate to a folder via your sidebar’s Favorites list, there’s nothing there. This happened to me recently, and I discovered it’s a routine problem people are experiencing.
While several solutions have been proposed, including deleting cache files and the like, what appears to work best—and worked for me—is to restart your Mac. When I had my sidebar faves disappear, I also had some other seemingly inexplicable slowdowns and system oddities. These went away with the restart as well.
This is the sort of thing that Apple will fix in a dot release (perhaps 10.11.2?), but, for the meantime, restart in an orderly fashion when you see it happen.
The Favorites menu can disappear in El Capitan.
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Author: Glenn Fleishman, Senior Contributor
Glenn Fleishman’s most recent books include Take Control of iOS and iPadOS Privacy and Security, Take Control of Calendar and Reminders, and Take Control of Securing Your Mac. In his spare time, he writes about printing and type history. He’s a senior contributor to Macworld, where he writes Mac 911.