Does Mac OS X write any unique info to external drives on mount?

[Unspeaked]

I've always wondered this: I know when you mount a drive (USB stick, FireWire external or even an iPod of some sort) in OS X, a few invisible files get created. And if you have an AV program, sometimes it will write files to the drive. Same with some other third party apps.

Do any of these files contain personal information, or things unique to the machine? Like user name or directory structure or things of that nature?

I assume they don't, or else you'd probably see it mentioned more often, but I was wondering if anyone had a definitive answer..?

 

[mac2x]

Good question. I'm guessing probably not; but who knows?

FWIW, this is what's on my Time Machine volume: (in a terminal) cd into /Volumes/Time Machine Backups (or whatever disk you are interested in), and then run ls -la

 

[Unspeaked]

Good question. I'm guessing probably not; but who knows?

FWIW, this is what's on my Time Machine volume: (in a terminal) cd into /Volumes/Time Machine Backups (or whatever disk you are interested in), and then run ls -la

Yeah, the .fseventsd and .Spotlight-V100 files seem to get placed on any disk that's mounted on the desktop.

 

[mmulin]

I've always wondered this: I know when you mount a drive (USB stick, FireWire external or even an iPod of some sort) in OS X, a few invisible files get created. And if you have an AV program, sometimes it will write files to the drive. Same with some other third party apps.

Do any of these files contain personal information, or things unique to the machine? Like user name or directory structure or things of that nature?

I assume they don't, or else you'd probably see it mentioned more often, but I was wondering if anyone had a definitive answer..?

The Spotlight file will contain metadata for the files present on the drive as well the username it belongs to.

If you don't want any of the Mac OSX created files on specific drives, you can use BlueHarvest.