stupid .Trashes

I had a horrible fight with a Mac today. Gasp and shock! Yes, I found one instance of complete idiocy in the Mac OS.

At the end of my magazine design lab today, I tried to copy the files I’d worked on to my USB drive but got the message that there wasn’t enough space on the disk. Okay, I thought, just delete the older files I don’t need. Simple enough. But no matter how much stuff I deleted (sent to the Trash), paring my files all the way down to just fonts and one photo I definitely didn’t want to leave in the Trash on a public computer, the drive kept reading as “72.1 megs free” (or however the phrase goes on a Mac).

I started freaking out then. Maybe the one photo I’d left on there was royally screwed up (coming from a PC; I’d believe it) and was really larger than the 71 megs it said. Maybe my drive was royally screwed up and I’d have to run out and buy a new one. Maybe there really was 840 megs of stuff somewhere on my drive and it just had to sit there so I’d have to run out and buy a new drive anyway, possibly a 2 gig or larger one to hold all my files.

I come home, plug my USB drive in my trusty (note the sarcasm) Dell PC, and what do I see? A faint folder (I have hidden files and folders showing, because I’m a control freak like that) called “.Trashes”! Of course! Only Macs have extraneous system files that start with a period! I check the folder and yup, all the files I’d “sent to the Trash” were there!

According to this page, Some Basics for Using USB Drives, I would have to go an extra step and empty the Trash on the Mac hard drive to clear my external drive!

How silly of me! Of course I should have thought of that! Who in their right mind wouldn’t know that “deleted” files don’t really get deleted on a Mac until the Trash is emptied! Too bad this is a public computer for the GrC department and the settings are such that any time the computer restarts, any and all files on the Desktop go into the Trash. I’d hate to inadvertently delete some student’s last copy of a file, so I never empty the Trash. (Unless I really don’t want some snoopy person to see the file that I’d just sent to the Trash. *grin*)

Pardon me for saying this, but I really like Microsoft’s option of holding Shift while deleting (or “Recycling” which turns into “Delete” on the right-click menu) and thus bypassing that step of deleting from the Recycle Bin when I really know I don’t want the file anymore. Does Mac have this option somewhere? Cmd+Option+Shift+3+Return+Enter?

I feel like I should carry around an extra, empty USB drive with me now, just in case the one I normally use doesn’t have enough space for what I want to copy. But the only USB drives I have are two 512 meg Dell freebies (yeah, take a Dell drive to a Mac-dominated department *snerk*), a 12 meg Xerox freebie (what the heck is this good for? Transferring Microsoft Office documents?), and my Iomega external hard drive. The Iomega has 60 gigs, but it’s sort of too big for my bookbag, and besides, I have allll my files backed up on there. I don’t want to accidentally mess up the drive by knocking the USB cable out or something.

Maybe I should go out and buy a newfangled 4 gig USB drive …

(Oh yes. I don’t have the files I worked on in lab. I just have the InDesign Exchange file. Yaaay, re-editing many high res photos, what fun I have to look forward to!)

4 thoughts on “stupid .Trashes

  1. I dislike the .Trashes files too. X( Completely caught me off guard when I realized I didn’t have enough space to copy an Illustrator file to my 1 gig USB drive (when I deleted half of what was on there), only to realize that I needed to empty the trash as well. I miss some features that were on Windows (i.e. the ability to defrag your hard-drive without rebooting).

    I’m really hoping that Apple would figure out a way around this. It would be nice if the Finder didn’t litter my hard-drive with its .DS_Store shite. X(

  2. Usually you would have to. If you look up “defrag” or something similar on their support site, they’ll mention that defragging is not necessary. If you notice your computer is acting slow, reboot and it should be fine.

    On the other hand, if you’re working on some really big files that slow your computer down, you might need to look into defragmentation software…which you have to pay for. C’mon Apple! I’d rather run software to defrag my hard-drive rather than reboot. XO (I mean, it’s not that much trouble…)

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