Mac Users

.Spotlight-V100 says hello!

Fuckin thumbs.db and lost+found hiding on every USB stick.

What drives me batty about thumbs.db is that on a modern high end machine with an nvme drive it's not meaningfully faster then just regenerating thumbnails on demand every time, and in fact can be slower under some circumstances. Yet there's no "I don't need this turn it off" option.
- also now that we have jpegxl you can just load the first bit of data for a thumbnail, lmao
- What about remote drves though?
Seriously fuck thumbs.db anywhere it can be found.
THIS IS WHY NTFS HAS ALTERNATE DATA STREAMS, USE THEM YOU FUCKERS YOU CREATED IT.
- EXPLAIN HOW
- We use Btrfs not NTFS here
  https://github.com/maharmstone/btrfs
- Easiest fix, change the folder view to another, like "list", then back and it won't be locked anymore. Might take a second or two, but will unlock.
Or as my parents call them, "A virus!"
I have lost+found on my Linux drives... what am I doing wrong?
- Nothing.
  If you run fsck (filesystem check), it will look for blocks of data that look like files, but have no actual filename attached. Simplified, that can happen as a result of unexpected shutdowns (like kernel panic) or IO conflicts (where one process deletes the file but the other writes data to where the file used to be). If fsck finds such "lost files", it will put them in lost+found on the respective volume.
  If you have trouble with missing files after a crash, it might be worth looking for them there. Otherwise, it probably doesn't matter.

Meh, that's nothing - just look at the multitude of directories forced upon any storage device you plug into something running Android.

Isn't it just SD cards it automatically prepares to use as an extension of the main filesystem by automatically mirroring the default filestructure onto it?
- I usually only plug in SD cards, so I finally just grabbed my SSD to check - same thing happened. What kind of storage devices were you thinking it wouldn't happen to?

thumbs.db says hello

Don’t come anywhere near us

Wait until they cross paths with the ._DS_Store abomination.

What's that? It rings a bell and I've been wondering all thread whether I misremembered the correct name.

The most reliable fingerprint.

Hahahaha that's actually hilarious

I’m such a Mac user that I don’t even get it. I am simultaneously laughing at myself and embarrassed.

MacOS create these directories to store metadata. But because it starts with a dot, you don’t normally see it.
- macOS only does this on network shares or external storage that’s formatted in neither HFS+ nor APFS, Apple‘s file system formats.
Depending on how you interact with your computer, and when you started being a Mac user, I’m not surprised.
Starting at macOS 10.12 16A238m, Finder will not display .DS_Store files (even if you ran defaults write com.apple.finder AppleShowAllFiles YES in Terminal to show hidden system files).
Wikipedia
- Apple treats it's users like children, i would feel so not respected. Yeah you bought the machine but don't worry your pretty little head with these confusing files
That's cause they're hidden from you. The file does not show up on MacOS, even if you enable showing hidden files.

Am too poor to afford mac, what this mean?

It’s a folder that macOS will leave on usb sticks with meta data and stuff I think
Idk I delete it on sight.
- On any non Mac native filesystem I think. Anything that MacOS can read but isn't the original filesystem (it used to be HFS, a long time ago, I have no idea what it is nowadays) will be peppered with those metadata files, disk, floppy, thumb drive, whatever.
- Very cool, I'm still kinda confused why .DS_Store is the identifier for such a folder but still cool Thanks

It’s a good thing I never created OS file systems because I would have balls.chin files everywhere. Well, the truth is that someone would have forked it just to change that, then I would have raged and abandoned the project, then a competent maintainer would have grabbed it. What a world.