[macOS] Disk image location not working

[kenjutsu]

Hi,

I have installed Docker Desktop 4.20.1 (110738) on my MacBook Air M1, 2020 running macOS 13.4.

Under Settings → Resources → Advanced, I changed the Disk image location to my external SSD drive. After clicking on Apply & restart, all I get is the spinning blue “circle”. It has been doing this for more than 40 minutes now.

Any ideas?

Edit: Also, the selected folder on the SSD drive remains empty except for the created DockerDesktop folder that also remains empty

[rimelek (Ákos Takács)]

I don’t know the solution, but I tried to change the location now and I got the same result, although I didn’t wait for 40 minutes. My guess was Docker Desktop copied the data slowly so I copied the disk image manually in the automatically created “DockerDesktop” folder but that didn’t work, because the “DockerDesktop” folder was not empty. When I tried to set DockerDesktop as destination, it just created a new DockerDesktop folder inside it.

Fortunately when stopped Docker Desktop and started it again, it used the original folder so I didn’t break my environment.

My other guess was that macOS needs permission to write your SSD, but I used another folder my user’s home so it couldn’t be the problem for me and I couldn’t find any indication of copying in the logs.

tail -f "$HOME/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/host"/* | grep -i copy

The above command will give you warnings because there are directories there not just regular files, but I tried this to search for possible indications in all the log files. If you check the files sorted by time

cd "$HOME/Library/Containers/com.docker.docker/Data/log/host"
ls -latr 

You will find log files changing because the host can’t reach the virtual machine which is not running, but I still couldn’t find out what was happening. Then I tried to search among the open issues and find it

Docker hangs on Disk Image Location change to empty folder on external volume

You can read the suggestions there and comment to share your experience.

Update:

I found this topic which is very similar to this issue except that is related to Windows:

Changing disk image location not working

This issue got fixed with Docker Desktop 4.20.0: