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Mysterious lost+found folder
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Manhattan Beach, CA
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Offline
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Administrators, if this needs to be in a different forum please move it.
I have just found a strange folder at the root level of my hard drive. It's named lost+found and contains a number of Unix executable files. I can find no information about what/who created it or what it does.
Within this folder is a folder named 1239486. In this folder there is a folder named 502 which is empty, and then a number of files: ARD_ABJMMRT, cs_cache_lock_502, ics1053, MobileSync.lock.d807xxxx and others.
Can anyone help me understand what this is, and whether I can delete it?
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MBP 15" 2.4 Ghz 4Gb
MBA 13" 1.6 Ghz 2Gb
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status:
Online
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I think you can safely get rid of it.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Manhattan Beach, CA
Status:
Offline
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Thanks. Any idea what it is or what created it?
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MBP 15" 2.4 Ghz 4Gb
MBA 13" 1.6 Ghz 2Gb
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status:
Online
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It looks like some temporary support files that got misplaced instead of being deleted. If you used a disk utility recently, it probably found them.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Forum Regular
Join Date: Dec 2003
Location: Manhattan Beach, CA
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Thanks. That makes sense.
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MBP 15" 2.4 Ghz 4Gb
MBA 13" 1.6 Ghz 2Gb
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Administrator  Join Date: May 2000
Location: California
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Offline
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That folder is created as needed by fsck. Either by running Disk Utility manually, or by the startup check on the boot partition. It contains orphaned files or directories. Orphaned items are allocated, but nothing links to them. They are a symptom of some disk damage, but when fsck repaired things, it didn't know where to put them.
They usually come from unexpected shutdowns, when buffers were not fully flushed to disk. Most often, they are temp and cache files as suggested previously, and can be deleted at will. But lost+found is a recovered files folder, you might find a file you'd been working on in there after a crash. You should probably check the contents before deleting, to see if something useful got saved.
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status:
Online
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When fsck found an orphaned file on my drive, it put it in a folder named DamagedFiles. . . .
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Mac Elite
Join Date: Sep 2005
Location: Vancouver, BC
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reader50 is right, except that I've never seen "lost+found" on a Mac. I've seen such directories on Linux systems with ext2/ext3, but never a Mac. :-S
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Clinically Insane
Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Los Angeles
Status:
Online
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It doesn't happen often, Tomchu. I have only seen it occur once on all the Macs I have ever administered.
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"The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground." TJ
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Moderator  Join Date: Apr 2000
Location: Gothenburg, Sweden
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Offline
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Think I've seen it once or twice as well. The name of the folder may be related to which part of the OS calls fsck when those files are created, or which filesystem is used.
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