Have you had any problems with the Finder in Big Sur 11.1? I ask because I’ve had some strange events in which my main working SSD sometimes vanishes from the Finder, although that external drive remains mounted normally. Let me explain.

To conserve space on my iMac Pro’s internal SSD, I use a folder on one of my six external SSDs as my main working location. I leave the iMac Pro running at all times, and it isn’t even allowed to sleep. When I’m not working in the Finder, I ‘park’ my two Finder windows in Column mode with that working folder open, and have added it to the list of Favourites.

Since updating Big Sur to 11.1, I’ve switched to the Finder only to see that working folder missing from Favourites, and those two windows displaying all the volumes from the location Howard’s iMac Pro, as if the external SSD had been unmounted, although it’s still listed in Locations. As with all these unexplained events, this appears random.

The first time that it happened, I assumed that the external SSD had somehow unmounted then remounted, although neither I nor any running software appeared to have done so. There are no notifications about such an event either. It appeared that the Finder had simply lost its place, lost my working folder from Favourites, and carried on without it.

Since then, this has happened every few days, but only once when I’ve come to use my Mac for the first time in the morning. Although I can’t rule out spontaneous unmounting and remounting, there’s never been any evidence of any change in the availability of any of those six external disks.

When it first started to happen, I reset my two open Finder windows with the usual working folder open, forced the Finder to be restarted, and carried on. Once or twice the Finder still refused to display the contents of that folder, even though the volume was well and truly mounted at the time. I then closed both windows, opened and set them up again, and everything returned to normal.

For the last week or so, when parking those Finder windows, I have also selected a text file to be shown as a QuickLook thumbnail preview. My working folder has since remained completely stable, and has stopped vanishing.

Has anyone else running Big Sur 11.1 had a similar experience, please?