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zen

macrumors 68000
Original poster
Jun 26, 2003
1,713
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Posting this query courtesy of a friend with a Mac problem. He says:

>>

Does anyone know how to stop a Mac creating large hidden files on portable storage?

If I plug a USB stick or a camera memory card into the Mac it works fine but when it's plugged into the PC and you select "Show hidden files and folders" there are (occasionally very) large hidden files which are usually duplicates of whatever was stored on there before including a ".trashes" folder which can also get quite large.

We tracked an issue with some digital cameras down to this recently and I can't find any setting on the Mac to stop it doing it.

Does the same on Network drives as well.

>>

Any ideas? I thought OS X stopped doing this with Leopard?
 
Posting this query courtesy of a friend with a Mac problem. He says:

>>

Does anyone know how to stop a Mac creating large hidden files on portable storage?

If I plug a USB stick or a camera memory card into the Mac it works fine but when it's plugged into the PC and you select "Show hidden files and folders" there are (occasionally very) large hidden files which are usually duplicates of whatever was stored on there before including a ".trashes" folder which can also get quite large.

We tracked an issue with some digital cameras down to this recently and I can't find any setting on the Mac to stop it doing it.

Does the same on Network drives as well.

>>

Any ideas? I thought OS X stopped doing this with Leopard?

Try and empty the trash when the card is connected to the mac, it treats it differently than a Windows PC. Then when you connect the card to the PC the .Trashes file should be much smaller.
 
Try and empty the trash when the card is connected to the mac, it treats it differently than a Windows PC. Then when you connect the card to the PC the .Trashes file should be much smaller.

True. Other than in Windows, Mac OS lets you untrash files that are on a memory-card or USB stick. Until you empty the trash, off course
 
The solution is to create a zip file without the offending files, using the tool mentioned in this thread, if you're transferring files from Mac to PC, then decompress the zip file on the PC. It's a royal pain to do this - but it does work.
 
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