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asherman13

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 31, 2005
914
0
SF Bay Area, CA
There's a folder titled "lost+found" in my Home folder, and I don't know how it got there, and whether or not it's important.

I had Filevault enabled as of yesterday, and I had to repair the .sparseimage before I could disable it. When I repaired it, this folder appeared. I successfully disabled Filevault (YES!!!), and the folder is still there. Inside the folder, there's a lot of cache files, some small insignificant .pngs, and Safari bookmarks.

On October 11, Filevault crashed, and I lost all my preferences and Safari bookmarks. In opening all these bookmarks, I found many of the ones that I lost! (Yes!)

Is it safe to delete these files?
 
lost+found is an artifact of fsck (presumably the repair you ran). It contains files that were found during the scan that weren't attached to directories.

The best you can do is rummage through and see if anything important is in there before trashing.
 
lost+found is an artifact of fsck (presumably the repair you ran). It contains files that were found during the scan that weren't attached to directories.

The best you can do is rummage through and see if anything important is in there before trashing.

Alright, thanks. :)
 
Those folders can also be generated if you have to force a power shutdown or uncleanly dismount an external drive. Most unix-like OSes will try to clean up their inode table (using fsck or similar) the next time they start up after a problem. Anything they recover goes into lost+found.
 
Those folders can also be generated if you have to force a power shutdown or uncleanly dismount an external drive. Most unix-like OSes will try to clean up their inode table (using fsck or similar) the next time they start up after a problem. Anything they recover goes into lost+found.

I have a folder like this (lost+found) and I cannot delete it! It will not go away! Leopard says that the files are in use but they aren't. Any ideas? I've reboted.
 
lost+found is in general part of the Unix Filesystem of Mac OS (and other Unix and Linux systems too) You will normally find them on each partition/drive on your system, as long as it is not formatted in Windows/DOS formats.

Files in the Lost and found as stated before are put in when you did an Unclean Shutdown (Holding the powerbutton until the system turns off, unplugging it,etc...) or if you have some disk problems, or OS Problems. Many times the files are kinda unreadable and can be deleted safely... But it is there incase something horible gets messed up and needs to be fixed manually... This process is tough and I have never needed to do so, and I have been working with Unix systems at a fairly low level for many years. This is not part of a backup or timemachene. It is part of disk cleanup, so when it found some files links that were not complete they put it in the lost and found, in the odd chance that it will be important.
 
I just went through all the folders and stuff, kept what i wanted and trashed what I didn't. I also backed up everything onto an external HDD and a disc before I did so.

If it isn't taking up much space, you could just leave it alone.
 
lost+Found folder... trying to recover data

First off, I'm an idiot. I was cleaning up my laptop, and also ran a disk utility. Ended up deleting a desktop folder that held all my work from 2012. It is 100% gone! I tried a few recovery tools, no luck. the only thing I spotted was this lost+found folder that I hadn't noticed before. it has a 3.7 gig file called iNode in it, and that is all. Is there any chance this contains my files?... from earlier strings, it looks like this might just be a lion install backup or something, but I am desperate. Any help is hugely appreciated.:confused:
 
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