Flash drive loses storage space and…
by Stii
…is driving me nuts. I noticed it the first time with my own flash drive on OS X. I delete files off it, but the storage space left keeps on getting smaller and smaller. At first I could not see why in the name of Riku Lätti it did that. I opened up the Terminal App and:
$ cd /Volume/FlashDiskName $ ls -al
I saw there was a hidden folder called .Trash and when I did a scan of that folder I noticed it is full of old shit long time deleted. Now, for me it was cool every time going on the command line to empty the hidden trash folder, but just now Lester complained that it is not going to work so well for him :/
The solution on OS X is to enable Finder to show hidden files. Here are the steps:
Open up your Terminal.app (it can be found in Applications -> Utilities -> Terminal.app)
On the command line do the following:
$ defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE $ killall Finder
Open up Finder again and go to your flash drive and you’ll see the .Trash folder. Empty the bugger.
I’m not sure why some flash drives do this. I’m not even sure if all of them do it. Maybe there is a better way somewhere out there to disable flash drives doing it. If you know of some way, let us know!
When you insert a flash normally used in Windows machines in a Mac it creates that folder automatically. In fact it creates several folders.
Fortunately those folders are not hidden and can be deleted easily.
So perhaps it would help to stick the Flash disk in a Windows machine from time to time when the space gets less and less.
Nah, Arthur, don’t have such a thing… I’d rather just live with this pain and deal with it this way rather than having to deal with Windows at any time. ;-)
I would love to know how to get my Mac to stop leaving all the bloody .DS_Store files and others on the various Windows SMB shares, etc. Especially the 4KB ._ files it creates for videos. Bleh.
Hey Craig, not sure about the files it creates for videos, but to prevent it from creating .DS_Dtore files on network drives, try the following:
In the command line:
$ defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
I have not tested it, but it is worth a try!
When I delete anything off my flash drive I have to empty the trash on my Mac before I can reclaim that space. Design flaw of the century!
Another annoyance is that you have to delete the entire trash rather than being able to delete individual items like you could do in….say…. Windows 95!
You can install the secrets pref pane for OSX. I allows you to switch on the “view hidden files” option and alot more. (Leapord only)
http://secrets.blacktree.com
SaulK – you’re right there. When you delete stuff off your flash drive your .Trash folder on the FD is linked to your Mac’s trash folder. So, once deleting a file off the FD empty your Mac’s trash folder and the .Trash folder is emptied.
Nice find TiaanW!
If you have difficulty finding the PrefPane in the link above just download it here…
http://code.google.com/p/blacktree-secrets/
Alakazaam-infrotmaoin found, problem solved, thanks!
iJu7qo iyylfdrjiloe
5GnuVa blpepbkyztfk
Nautilus on Ubuntu does exactly the same thing, except that (I think) it asks you what you want to do with the .Trash when you unmount. I normally show hidden files and recursively delete .Trash manually anyway, just to be sure.