Openomics: innovation drives value

An odd thing happened to me today, my camera was saying my 1GB memory stick was full, but I had only a few dozens of pictures on it. The solution did not occur to me right away so I thought I would bring it up here.

My first reaction was rather Pavlovian, I must admit. Disk full? Alright, I'll delete some files! but clearly, there was no way my few pictures were responsible for the loss of a full giga of disk space :) I then took a more rationale approach of looking at the memory stick info as shown on a Mac (Cmd-I).

Could it be that sectors of the fash memory had gone bad and been disabled? --I do not even know whether this makes any sense but I did ask myself that question. Apparently not, my GB of disk space is there and used by 914MB of stuff. Could it be that I copied data onto the stick without knowing/remembering it? Apparently not, when I open the memory stick inside Apple Finder, all the directories (root, DCIM and MISC) are empty. There's gotta be hidden files! I'm thinking. Since I cannot find some "show hidden files" check-box in the Finder's Properties (Cmd-,), I quickly open a Terminal and cd to the memory stick volume.

It turns out my Mac had been moving to a local trash directory all of the picture files I had copied away and/or deleted (Cmd-Backspace) ever since I switch from a Windows to an Apple laptop. On Windows, the behavior is that files (on removable media) are deleted permanently. I learned today this is not the case on a Mac.

$ cd /Volumes/CYBERSHOT/
$ ls -la
total 384
drwxrwxrwx   1 user      group  16384 Sep 18 18:43 .
drwxrwxrwt@ 11 root      admin    374 Sep 18 18:42 ..
drwxrwxrwx@  1 user      group  32768 Jun 15  2008 .Trashes
-rwxrwxrwx   1 user      group   4096 Jun 15  2008 ._.Trashes
drwxrwxrwx   1 user      group  32768 Sep 18 18:43 .fseventsd
drwxrwxrwx   1 user      group  32768 Jul  2  2006 DCIM
-rwxrwxrwx   1 user      group      0 Jan  1  1970 MEMSTICK.IND
drwxrwxrwx   1 user      group  32768 Jul  2  2006 MISC
-rwxrwxrwx   1 user      group      0 Jan  1  1970 MSTK_PRO.IND
$ du -ks .Trashes
913964  .Trashes
$ rm -r .Trashes