Why is Chrome using my microSD card?

[navaira]

Hello,

first specs:

Macbook Air early 2015 13"/8/128
microSD card 128GB, Samsung Evo+ with Samsung adapter
Google Chrome 47.0.2526.80 (64-bit)
Mountain 1.6.1

Problem:

I have Mountain installed to eject the SD card the moment laptop falls asleep and re-mount it upon wake. It works most of the time. My SD card only has my iPhoto library on it. When I close the lid with iPhoto running, I get the message that card couldn't be unmounted as iPhoto was using it – fair enough. But it also adds Chrome to the list, and today for the first time it was Chrome alone that prevented unmount.

So – why the hell would Chrome be accessing a SD card containing only iPhoto library and nothing else whatsoever?!

(Please do not respond with "use Safari" )

Thanks in advance!

 

[keysofanxiety]

If I was to guess blindly:

1) You may have uploaded a photo to the Internet using Chrome, from your iPhoto library. May have still been open as a temporary file in the browser. Not likely at all, admittedly.

2) You ran out of RAM and paged to the SSD - as Chrome is a resource-hog, this is pretty much guaranteed. However going on this speculation, for some reason OS X decided to page to the SD card instead. Very unlikely.

3) Chrome randomly created a cache folder to the SD card for some reason. Fairly unlikely.

4) Google decided to float through your photos and upload your personal stuff to their evil cloud for nefarious purposes. Somewhat likely.

In conclusion, I haven't the foggiest. I'd check free space on your internal SSD and maybe check if any files/folders have been added to your SD card. Maybe run a volume verification for good measure. Hopefully somebody else may have a better idea.

And use Safari

 

[navaira]

Hahaha! The fourth does sound sensible Damn you Google! *shakes fist*

My internal SSD has 71 GB free which should be enough, and I do not see any files other than this one on the SD card. Hidden files:

 

[keysofanxiety]

Hahaha! The fourth does sound sensible Damn you Google! *shakes fist*

My internal SSD has 71 GB free which should be enough, and I do not see any files other than this one on the SD card. Hidden files:

View attachment 605705

Humm, anything in temporary items folder that might look like it's from Chrome? Just shooting in the dark though, I'm more curious than anything as I'd quite like to know for future.

Also, what's the uptime on your Mac? (Open Terminal, type in uptime). Maybe a quick restart with 'reopen windows when logging back in' disabled might do the trick for future, OS X starts to get a little hiccupy with a large uptime in my experience. Not that it would cause such an issue, but ...

 

[navaira]

I actually just restarted without reopening windows, had the same thought. We'll see what happens when I put the computer to sleep...

TemporaryItems has an empty folder inside, .fseventsd has loads of files called 000000000********* (other digits). That's all.

 

[chown33]

In Terminal, the 'lsof' command can tell you which files are open in which processes. If Chrome is keeping something open, you can find out what it has open where the path is to the card. If Chrome is intermittently opening and closing things, it might not show up right away.

Here's the online man page:
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Darwin/Reference/ManPages/man8/lsof.8.html

If you can't figure out what command-line options to use, post again with what you tried.

 

[navaira]

Amazing, I always wonder how people know these things! I just put it to sleep for 15 minutes to test, no Chrome activity. If this happens again I'll be back with lsof results. Thanks a lot!

 

[chown33]

Amazing, I always wonder how people know these things!

In my case, I use the Terminal a lot.

When the first Mac OS X versions came out, I spent some time scanning through all the commands, noting the interesting ones. I'd come from a traditional Unix background, and wondered how close the new Mac OS X tools were to what I already knew. After that, it's mainly a question of remembering things and using the 'apropos' command (or just googling).

For example:

apropos "open files"

and the output shows 'lsof'. Then it's 'man lsof'.

I just put it to sleep for 15 minutes to test, no Chrome activity. If this happens again I'll be back with lsof results. Thanks a lot!

I'm curious to see the results.

 

[navaira]

Hmmm. Happened again.

MacBook-Air:~ navaira$ lsof | grep HDD2
Google     398 navaira  175r     DIR                1,6       442       2 /Volumes/HDD2
Google     398 navaira  177r     DIR                1,6      1020  193086 /Volumes/HDD2/iPhoto Library.photolibrary
Google     398 navaira  178r     REG                1,6  14023697  305206 /Volumes/HDD2/iPhoto Library.photolibrary/AlbumData.xml

I am using Google Photos on my main Mac with the uploader. But the uploader is not installed on the Air. Can that somehow be a culprit?

 

[chown33]

Hmmm. Happened again.

MacBook-Air:~ navaira$ lsof | grep HDD2
Google     398 navaira  175r     DIR                1,6       442       2 /Volumes/HDD2
Google     398 navaira  177r     DIR                1,6      1020  193086 /Volumes/HDD2/iPhoto Library.photolibrary
Google     398 navaira  178r     REG                1,6  14023697  305206 /Volumes/HDD2/iPhoto Library.photolibrary/AlbumData.xml

I am using Google Photos on my main Mac with the uploader. But the uploader is not installed on the Air. Can that somehow be a culprit?

I know nothing about Google Photos, but it occurs to me that if it's storing something in the cloud, and that's then being read by another machine using the same cloud account, then it seems possible that the other machine would learn about the iPhoto Library and try doing something with it. The software might be setup to do that by default, given that Google likes to share things by default in order to mine your data provide an integrated experience.

I can't tell what the full process name of "Google" is, but if that's Chrome, you might want to look for a setting therein that tells it not to share things with your cloud account. You could try googling search terms like chrome photos integration.

 

[navaira]

The unfortunate thing is that I am finding Chromebook articles. I do not have either Google Photos or Google Drive, which is another suggestion. I've gone through settings and I don't have anything obvious there either.

Is there a way to block an application from accessing a drive? *sound of barrel bottom being scraped*

Edit: Aha! I do have that Google Drive thing in my "Chrome Apps" folder! (Which I hate...) Trying that...