Something strange is happening, very strange

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tafika

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OK, so I recently bought my eMac.
I use a USB memory stick in order to carry various things to and from home and college. I use Macs as part of my Graphics and Media courses, and I've never had a problem with using my memory stick with them. But on my own, whenever I remove it, by either selecting "Eject drive" from the menu from clicking on the drive icon, or by dragging the icon into the trash in order to remove it, I get all sorts of weird files on it. You know, the kind that come up when you don't remove the drive properly.
I don't get it, I always remove it properly, but I always get these extra files, but it only happens with my eMac.
Any suggestions as to what the problem may be? Or how I can fix it?
It's not doing any harm as far as I know, it's just really very irritating. lol
Any help is muchly appreciated. :)
 
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meltbanana314

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Do these files have names with periods in front of them like ".DS_store" or anything similiar?
 
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meltbanana314

Guest
Those are put there by the Mac OS X filesystem. On *NIX systems, files with periods in front of them are hidden. Windows uses a different filesystem and they show up as normal files in Explorer. Sometimes they contain sensitive data, so I wouldn't delete them.
 
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tafika

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I'm not the cleverest person when it comes to computers and whatnot. But I'm a little confused. Why does this only happen when I use my Mac at home, when as far as I can tell, I use the exact same system at college?
And, are you saying there is no way to stop this from happening?
 

dtravis7


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To farther back up what meltbanana314 said, when I log into my Windows network Shares with any of my Macs and copy files to the Windows machine, each drive in Windows I am working with from the Mac has .DS_store files in that directory.
 
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meltbanana314

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tafika said:
I'm not the cleverest person when it comes to computers and whatnot. But I'm a little confused. Why does this only happen when I use my Mac at home, when as far as I can tell, I use the exact same system at college?
And, are you saying there is no way to stop this from happening?

Ah, sorry. Misread your post slightly.

What operating systems do the Macs at school use, and what version of OS X does your eMac run?
 
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tafika

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The Macs I use at college are eMacs, which run with OS X 10.3. As does my eMac at home.
Which is why I thought that there would be someway to stop this happening. As I only ever get the trashes folder and .DS_Store when I remove my USB stick from my Mac at home.
 
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flonejek

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they might have disabled caching/metadata at the school for removable drives (Im not sure how to do this..) because .DS_Store usually holds stuff like thumbnail info and metadata such as the timestamps and so forth of the files in the folder to make searching faster (Spotlight in Tiger will essentially expand and centralize this process).
 
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tafika

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Ahh rightyo. Thanks.
I think I'll leave it. Too much effort to sort it out now.
*Lazy*
 
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By any chance, is the drive formatted using FAT-32? Most of them are from the factory. If so, they'll accumulate those files.

If you were to reformat them to HFS+ using Disk Utility, they should go away.

(Be sure to back up your files before reformatting. But you knew that.)
 
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tafika

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I have no idea how it's formatted, never really thought about that one.
Thanks so much. I shall try that out and see what happens. :)

Edit:
Um... I don't suppose you could expand on that a little could you? Because I just had a look, and I can't quite figure out how to do it.
 
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flonejek

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open disk utility (in Applications/Utilities) and then just select your thumbdrive then do an erase to HFS+ after backing up your stuff.
 
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Keep in mind that once you do this, should ever need to use the flash drive with a PC, it will not understand it!
 
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tafika

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ApplejustWorks said:
Keep in mind that once you do this, should ever need to use the flash drive with a PC, it will not understand it!

Really?
OK, well, I had a go, and I wasn't given the option to do any of that anyway.
I'll not bother now, as I need it to work with PCs, as my printer is only connected my PC network.
Thanks for the warning, you saved me a lot of panic if ever I managed to get it to work :)
 
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I have USB drive formated as FAT 32. for the same reason - to use it with PC.
but i do not have any of those nasty files on it. try to reformat the disk using PC.
stick it in usb port, right click and format.
 
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People you can't ask for others to give you a positive vote on the rep system, the most you can do is what most of us mods have done in our signature and remind people about the voting system. When we set this up we didn't want a bunch of, "Add to my rep points!" etc so that's why we made that rule.. so please stick with it :)

Thanks for being a part of the community!
 

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