What is creating the "Temporary Items" folder on my NAS

Question

I have a Drobo FS which works great, but I have a Temporary Items folder in each share. Does anyone know what it creating these folders?

Solution

If you are mounting the shares to a Mac, then OS-X is likely creating them. There are other OS-X hidden files and folders that could be generated when you mount the remote share. These files and folders are usually hidden from Mac users automatically by the operating system, but they may be visible to other systems and are mostly just a nuisance.

Here are a few common ones you may find depending on Apple OS version:

• .DS_Store: This is a common hidden file that is created in each directory you view using Finder. It stores stuff like folder view settings and icon positions
• .Trash(es): Stays until you empty your recycle bin.
• .TemporaryItems, '._Temporary Items' or 'Temporary Items' folders: These are used as temporary storage. Ideally, the application using it would clean up after itself, but this does not always happen.
• .Spotlight-V100: used by the spotlight indexer

Usually, you can safely ignore these folders and not worry about them unless they are causing other issues or are consuming too much disk space.

Some options:

1. Stop using the application that's creating the folder.
2. Empty the contents of the folder and make it read only. Keep in mind that this may break whatever app you are using.
3. Mark the file hidden and ignore it.
4. Or just simply ignore them.

Comments

[slhck]

Are you on a Mac, even? Are you mounting as NFS or SMB? You can try BlueHarvest to prevent them from being created.

[JeremyW]

We have a macbook which does access the shares, but I don't know how they're being mounted. It's just via the finder

[JeremyW]

Is there a way tostop it doing that?

[InChargeOfIT]

@AntonyScott updated my answer some. Hope it helps.

[JeremyW]

I just wrote a little console application in C# to remove the offending folders, it also removed the .DS_Store files and touches some files I needed processing. thanks.