Recover space on an iPod

May 31, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: kirkmc

I was recently wondering why there are so many "other" files on my iPod: you know, when you connect the iPod, you see a graphic at the bottom of the iPod Summary window in iTunes showing what kinds of files you have: music, video, photos, other. For some reason, it seemed to be much more than it should have been. "Other" contains your album artwork, any files you have on the iPod if you use it in hard disk mode, and games, but it seemed that the space used was excessive.

So, with Terminal, I started rooting around. (The iPod should be in hard disk mode to do this.) I found the following folder:

/Volumes/Dark Star/.TemporaryItems/folders.501/TemporaryItems
which contained a whopping 300 MB of files, named "Temp file 1", etc. I deleted these files, and recovered a fair amount of space.

To find the appropriate folder, replace the part of the path following Volumes with the name of your iPod, then, if you are not the first user on your Mac, look inside the .TemporaryItems folder to see which folders it contains. User 501 is the first user created on your Mac; 502 is the second; etc. You may need to check several folders, if you have used the iPod as different users. After you have cded to the appropriate folder, you can type open . to display its contents in the Finder and delete the files by moving them to the Trash and emptying the Trash.

It seems that these files are created during syncs, perhaps when something goes wrong or when you disconnect the iPod too early, but even after I deleted them once, I looked soon after and found more files, though I had not aborted any syncs. So, you might want to check this whenever your "Other" files become larger than you think they should.

Note: after writing up this hint, I checked on my son's iPod, and found he had no .Temporary Items folder. I then asked my buddy Doug Adams, and he didn't have one either. But in both cases, the iPods hadn't been used in hard disk mode. Checking an older iPod mini, I found a handful of temp files, much smaller than on my 80 GB iPod. So it seems these files have something to do with using the iPod in disk mode. Check your iPod and post info in the comments.

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