Ok, so this is not a post to take a jab at Samba, but all 3 of my computers (all Zorin OS) have experienced the same problem with Samba. After some time the shares disappear, evaporates, or whatever. They're not visible or accessible anymore. When I open the file manager and click on «Other Locations», I can’t see the folders that are shared on the current computer. If I open the file manager on another computer on the same network and click on «Other Locations» and click on the icon for the previous computer, all I see is a folder called «print$» If I try «Connect to server» and enter the full path to the share I want to open, I get this error message: «Unable to access location. Failed to mount Windows share: No such file or directory».
I've just removed Samba and reinstalled it. Now nothing works. If I open the file manager and click on «Other Locations», I can’t even see the hosts that are online on the local network. All those icons disappeared. Why is Samba such a pain in the cheeks? Can anybody give me any guidance, please?
If you have Synaptic Package Manager installed, search for NFS and install all packages related to this. Remember to right-click properties of Folders you wish to share. The obvious one is the 'Public' folder. 
So you're saying I should ditch Samba and install NFS instead. Installing something else doesn't fix my original problem. I'm not familiar with NFS. I'm too lazy to do any research. How is it compared to Samba and is it a good solution if I just want to share a few folders between 3 computers? Do I have to install the NFS server on all the computers that have shared folders? Does NFS integrate with the file manager?
What about the Samba users out there? Nobody had similar problems?
Ok. On my good lady's PC MXhLinux xfce was due for a fresh install as 'wild flower' was due to expire in June. So I tried various alternatives and finally plumped for Q4OS KDE. I backed up all my ladycs data to an external WD Elements 4 Tb drive. When I tried to restore the data, it kept crashing. The machine is one I put together in 2006 with a single AMD Athlon Procesor, 2.2 GHz, and maxed out at 2 Gb RAM and an EVGA 512 Mb 8x AGP card. Then I had an idea. I copied the backed up data to my Ryzen 7 Rig with 16 Gb of RAM and thought it might work faster over the network but this also crashed because the network card installed wasn't as fast as my Onhboard LAN on the machine. However once NFS was installed on both machines and the copied backup made shareable there was no problem at all apart from the crashing. I think it is easier than Samba. As in all network scenarios, just make sure the computers are in the same workgroup. You need to righthclic the folders you want to Share. The simplest for conformity is to share your Public folders, or say setup specific folders in Documents that you want to share.
Ok. I will give NFS a try. Thanks for the advice.
I tried NFS last night but ironically could not get it to work in Q4OS. Mi Lady's machine got a kernel update an freezing occuring more regularly. May have to try Trinity Desktop. I am also wondering if I had been trying PCLinuxOS as there is only a few NFS files in Synaptic.
Not another victim of the new 6.8 kernel 
No, partial update to 6.1.x!
I'm still too lazy to learn NFS. I glanced over a few lengthy tutorials and it seemed like a lot of work for very little gain, compared to Samba.
I also got a sneaking suspicion that the problems I had were not related to the Samba share service at all, but had to do with the file manager Nautilus. So after reinstalling Samba, which was unnecessary, I had no problem connecting to shares using smbclient in the terminal.
That told me something was corrupted in Nautilus, probably after an update. So I ran this command: sudo apt-get install --reinstall nautilus.
After that everything was hunky-dory. All my samba servers and shares reappeared under "Networks" ("Other Locations"). The End
Glad you got sorted. I have taken another look at what I had been using and forgot that both computers were running Plasma, also not on Zorin but Q4OS KDE Plasma 5.27. NFS installed but the crucial element that needs it to work is kdenetwork-filesharing. 
I too had this issue yesterday / today, and most probably due to recent updates. The SMB shares from my NAS were no longer accessible, but gave me the seemingly well-known "failed to retrieve share list from server" error.
I could still access individual shares by entering smb://ip-address/share-name
Your solution fixed it. Thank you!
This topic was automatically closed 90 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.