Spinning wheel when accessing/writing files

[Chamullo]

Hey all,

Weird problem that has suddenly started happening in the last week or so.

Whenever I'm doing an operation related to accessing files or writing files I get the spinning beachball for about 15-20 seconds.

For example, downloading an attachment - I click download, tell it where to save, then beachball for 20 seconds, then starts downloading.

Uploading a file to wetransfer - click select file, beachball, then allows me to select the file.

Similar thing within Pro Tools, which is the mail app. I use. When importing files into a project, select the files, then beachball before it finally imports.

Funnily enough I can record 24 channels of audio simultaneously without issue!

I have tried using disk utility and repairing all disks but it shows no errors and the problem persists.

I'm on Mojave and for compatibility reasons I can't upgrade. That said it has been fine for the last 4 years.

Can anyone suggest what this might be?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

How much RAM do you have in your Mac, and how much free space on the Hard Drive?

 

[MacsBug]

When you get the Save dialog box, it queries all available drives that is connected to your Mac. If you have external drives, one may be going bad.

You can disconnect any external drives and then try to save a file. If you do not have the delay, plug in 1 external drive at a time to find the culprit.

 

[TonyAguila]

And there are so many causes for beach balling. EtreCheck is a good utility for troubleshooting these, but my primary go-to is reinstalling macOS first. Once you have a copy of the current version you’re running, the operation goes rather quickly.

 

[Chamullo]

How much RAM do you have in your Mac, and how much free space on the Hard Drive?

32 gig RAM, 80 gig space on the system drive

 

[Chamullo]

When you get the Save dialog box, it queries all available drives that is connected to your Mac. If you have external drives, one may be going bad.

You can disconnect any external drives and then try to save a file. If you do not have the delay, plug in 1 external drive at a time to find the culprit.

Thank you. I will try this

 

[Chamullo]

And there are so many causes for beach balling. EtreCheck is a good utility for troubleshooting these, but my primary go-to is reinstalling macOS first. Once you have a copy of the current version you’re running, the operation goes rather quickly.

I will give Etrecheck a go

 

[Rodananne]

32 gig RAM, 80 gig space on the system drive

80GB of storage space may not be enough. 20% of the total storage space is adviseable. I have 512GB total on my M1 MBP I usually have 100GB or more free.

 

[Lufbrarunner]

As above, 80gb may not be enough, how big is the drive in total?

 

[TonyAguila]

What is the exact type and model year of your Mac? Your immediate solution could be adding an external drive in order to offload data from the internal drive in order to provide more space for memory/data cacheing.