Finder Favorites stuck

When upgrading to a new MacBook Pro, I can’t rearrange the order of items in Finder windows’ Favorites, something which used to work fine. Although I can drag them into the order I want, they revert to standard when I next start up. Is this a corrupt preference file, and how can I fix it?

These are classic symptoms of a preference file that isn’t saving the changes you made, and the property list in question should be ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.finder.plist, which stores the great majority of Finder’s settings. The traditional way to fix this would be to move that file to another folder, such as Documents, then to log out and log back on again, or restart.

The snag with this is that macOS now manages preference files in a complex way, and you may find that the regenerated preference file still doesn’t solve the problem. In that case, use free tools such as Prefs

Editor ( bit.ly/prefs_editor) or PrefEdit ( bit.ly/

pref_edit) instead. There may also be more problems with your preference files, such as incorrect permissions settings, which can stop them working normally. Apple has recently started to recommend that these can be addressed by repairing their permissions — not in the old way as before El Capitan, but those in your Home folder. Apple provides complete details about this in bit.ly/ preference_permissions, and we look at this at bit.ly/electriclight_ repairingpermissions and provide simpler tools to help perform the repair.