Recover invisible missing space on your iDisk

Feb 04, '04 10:35:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

I recently discovered that my iDisk was almost full. At least that's what the .Mac preference pane was telling me. While my local iDisk showed only 8 MB used, the preference pane was showing 92 MB used. I tried all sorts of things to fix it: I turned off local syncing then turned it back on, I ran Backup, and cleared the Backup folder (even though I never use Backup), but nothing worked.

I finally turned off local syncing again and mounted the iDisk in the Finder. I discovered that my Public folder (which looked empty to me) contained over 80 MB of files. But I couldn't see them in the Finder.

Firing up the Terminal, I cded to /Volumes/my_iDisk_name/Public/, and looked inside. Sure enough, when doing ls -al (the -a shows invisible files), I found a handful of temporary files with names beginning with .fstemp. After deleting these files, my space was reclaimed. However, these files must have been generated when a sync was unable to complete. For some reason, the iDisk server didn't erase them. So, if you suddenly lose space on your iDisk, have a look in any folder where you might have tried to sync files to see if there are any such temporary files hanging out.

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