Closed: Can't use (true) folder in /Volumes

[Hayo Baan]

I've run into a strange situation with the Favorites and Navigator panels:

For practical purposes, I have created a Folder inside /Volumes to hold some of my files (I basically want it to pretend it's a disk, not a local folder). The problem is that PM doesn't seem to like this:
1) It's not shown as part of the navigator even though it's in my Finder sidebar (all other folders show up fine there).
2) When I add the folder to the Favorites by e.g. dropping it from the Finder. All seems to be well and I can access the subfolders just fine. However after closing and reopening PM, the folder is shown as disabled in the Favorites panel and I can no longer access it. Removing and re-adding works, but is quite cumbersome.

Any idea what's going on here?

[Kirk Baker]

Hayo,

I've run into a strange situation with the Favorites and Navigator panels:

For practical purposes, I have created a Folder inside /Volumes to hold some of my files (I basically want it to pretend it's a disk, not a local folder). The problem is that PM doesn't seem to like this:
1) It's not shown as part of the navigator even though it's in my Finder sidebar (all other folders show up fine there).
2) When I add the folder to the Favorites by e.g. dropping it from the Finder. All seems to be well and I can access the subfolders just fine. However after closing and reopening PM, the folder is shown as disabled in the Favorites panel and I can no longer access it. Removing and re-adding works, but is quite cumbersome.

Any idea what's going on here?

Yes.  PM knows what mounts in /Volumes are actual volumes and what isn't.  I'm surprised that macOS lets you create folders there without needing a super-user credential.

-Kirk

[Hayo Baan]

Yes.  PM knows what mounts in /Volumes are actual volumes and what isn't.  I'm surprised that macOS lets you create folders there without needing a super-user credential.

Hi Kirk, that's indeed what I expected; you treat /Volumes specially. I guess you are not going to (be able to) adapt this to allow for regular folders then?

Not a real problem since I worked around the issue already by creating a true volume on the disk. Luckily this isn't causing to much grief (I only needed to move the 80GB+ of data, which I had wanted to prevent); one of the advantages of the APFS file system is that the free spaces is shared between all volumes on a disk, so I'm wasting no more space than before.

And yes, I (of course) used admin credentials to create the “disk” inside /Volumes

[Kirk Baker]

Hayo,

No, we will not work with non-volumes in /Volumes and we will not accommodate exceptions to that.  There's a reason that you had to "sudo" to create that folder in /Volumes.  Apple doesn't want users to be able to do that.

-Kirk

[Hayo Baan]

Agreed