Also, it is shameful because Apple made an assumption that it can just write what it wants to a drive I may be just using to store files. Like 10TB of files. Now it’s full of 230,000 files of this garbage.

The other mystery is why some file dates get changed. I’ve had to resort to mounting these volumes read-only from my desktop mac till I can trust mac to play nice. Especially when the file date is a critical piece of information I’m trying to record.

For the rest: I think it is time to call in Godwins Law: nazi, nazi, nazi.

The lock switch on SD cards DOES NOT LOCK THE DATA. SD card drive hardware IS NOT REQUIRED to respect this switch’s setting.

And yes, engineers do design according to their personal philosophies. That’s how we get nightmares and a very few fantastic systems. I would submit that Windows, Mac OS (pre-UNIX), and UNIX have all caused nightmares for many. It’s also why DOS is still used for data forensics natively. All other OSes require drive locking hardware between the host and drive.

After some 45 years in engineering, building stuff that several billion people have now used, I’ve learned that Occam’s Razor (see William of Okham) applies in every case. No system should perform any function without necessity. In this case Mac OS should not leave trash behind on a non-Mac file system. If Mac OS really needs additional files or directories, then it should put them on its own system disk. And note that garbage collection on the flash drive itself is not viable, as it requires user cooperation to not rip the drive out before clean-up occurs.

Finally Apple is just as much a pirate as any other in Silicon Valley (my home), Redmond, or anywhere else. The many people who don’t buy Apple products, do so because Apple does not make them happy as customers. Steve Jobs is more a tyrant than Bill Gates ever was, and altruism is not a part of Apple any more than it is at any other corporation. Pandering to incompentent users brings in more dollars, and the IT support industry, one as large as the hardware/software development sector itself, sees sees this too. Not cynicism, this is just reality. As George Bernard Shaw wrote: “The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it”.

Regarding ignorance, there’s a quote attributed to Mark Twain I’d like to share:

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

I’ve known about these files since middle school. Ask yourself if your OS automatically indexes the contents of its volumes, allows you to store trash data without immediately deleting the file (a big reason most people probably come to you for data recovery in the first place), or allows you to store an icon to a volume on the disk itself! These are just some of the “self-serving” features these files enable.

If you suspect a disk to be needing recovery, NEVER plug it in to anything without making sure it won’t write to it. Duh… use a disk utility.

TZ, see the little “lock” switch on your SD card? Didn’t think so.

The majority of you guys just seem to wander into the Mac store and expect them to work like Windows. Go watch Pirates of Silicon Valley and you’ll know why a lot of things are the way it is today, computer wise.

Computers are tools built by people with unique philosophies. Apple’s philosophy is make the customer happy, and never make anything they wouldn’t want themselves. MS’s philosophy, unfortunately, involves making as much money with as little effort as possible.

For some reason, it doesn’t pollute my SD card when it is in my Samsung camcorder and I attach it. But if I put the same SD card in an adapter, it throws the garbage on, so I know it can do it.

My problem is less with Apple deciding to do this than with leaving no way to turn it off.

That said, I 100% agree that it’s very bad behavior to just set up shop with .Trashes, .Spotlight-V100, and .fseventsd directories on external filesystems that aren’t in Mac OS filesystem format. Many times external devices are very proprietary (digital cameras, voice recorders, etc) and when I throw away a file, I want it gone, not just moved into the .Trashes directory where it still takes up space. This alone drives me nuts; I can’t imagine the frustration of trying to do volume recovery when the OS is scribbling on it.

Actually I’m with Randy on that point. Windows (since NT) is the only OS to store its configuration in a single monolithic and vulnerable datastore. Whenever possible, I force all my programs to store its settings in its own program folder. This way I have never lost important configuration data and have rarely, if ever, had to actually reinstall anything, except for windows itself and I haven’t reformatted in over ten years.

However, in the current 21st century climate of pandering to the low-browed, formatting-is-a-solution-for-everything and OMG BIG BUTTONS! masses, I wouldn’t advise non-techs to do this.