I had an interesting, well maybe more than a little puzzling, change after updating my MacBook Air to 10.8.5. After the update all of my preferences in Finder were gone -things like Documents, Downloads, Dropbox and a few more. Couldn’t figure it out so made a call to Apple support and found out that sometimes during the upgrade process the Preferences disappear. The solution was quite simple.

With Finder up, click on Finder in the upper left, select Preferences and put check marks in the items you want to show. Problem solved – well almost except for Dropbox. To get Dropbox back (by the way if you don’t have Dropbox you probably should) click on your name in Preferences, provided you put a checkmark by your name in the earlier step, and you will see Dropbox in the display. Then just drag and drop Dropbox into the Preferences list.

Not very complicated but hopefully this short post will save you from some frustration.