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February 18, 2020
Question

HEY ADOBE!!! CONSISTENT CATASTROPHIC FAILURE PHOTOSHOP 2020 - MAC EXTERNAL HD

  • February 18, 2020
  • 5 replies
  • 1002 views

Is Adobe aware of the issue that arises nearly every attempt to save a project in PS20 to an external drive on a mac. It is never able to complete. It has devistated days of work and numerous projects. 

 

It begins to save the document, and freezes at some percentage. When this happens it is all over. Even when you cancel save processes. No new saves of any kind will ever go through. The only way to get around this is to force quit photoshop. and in some instances hard restart. Since were in the middle of save process of course the file gets corrupted. Also of course there is no projects available to restore singe photoshop cant save or write anything to computer either. 

 

Adobe. Seriously what are you doing. How dare you put this product out there when is is completely unable to save project files. 

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5 replies

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 19, 2020

Apparently I was a bit hasty there. Some further research reveals that exFAT is still claimed to work as a cross-platform file system between MacOS Catalina and Windows.

 

However. People are reporting intermittent problems on the Mac side, and the consensus seems to be that exFAT is simply very prone to errors and corruption. It's not very stable. A piece of advice I see repeated very often is to do the actual formatting on a Windows machine, not a Mac. Supposedly it works better then, on Mac too.

 

Increased security measures in Catalina probably exaggerates any problems.

 

And of course the usual consideration that Photoshop files are big, and the bigger the file, the more data in one go, the higher the likelihood of any one file getting hit by problems. That's just statistics. This is also why saving to a server can work splendidly for months, and then suddenly corrupt a Photoshop file.

 

The Adobe "known issues" page for Catalina still has this:

c.pfaffenbichler
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020
PECourtejoie
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020

I'm just wondering: is any other program affected by the EXFAT issue? I do not see many google results on the topic...

c.pfaffenbichler
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020

Good question. 

 

harrisflms, can you produce issues when saving large Illustrator or Indesign files to the affected volume? 

D Fosse
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020

You need to reformat your external drive. Since Catalina, MacOS will no longer accept exFAT or NTFS.

 

This means you can no longer share external drives between Mac and Windows machines. Apple's goal is to turn MacOS into a closed, self-contained ecosystem.

gener7
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020

From listening to others here, saving directly to an external disk is chancy. Not only is there Photoshop, but OS, hardware (especially connecters) and driver glitches. Save locally, then transfer over to your drive.

gener7
Community Expert
Community Expert
February 18, 2020

First see if this helpdoc has a solution:

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/networks-removable-media-photoshop.html

 

With 2020, Adobe has introduced the Cloud Document format psdc that will store and version your work work across different devices and platforms including Photoshop for the iPad.

 

https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/cloud-documents-faq.html

 

Also note we are volunteer help, not Adobe Employees, technical support or product developement.

 

For that, you would want to post there: https://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family