42 thousand invisible files...

[sbranum]

We were wondering what was making network copying, and even opening of folders on a co-worker's mac SOOOO SLOW... I made the invisible files visible, just to get a peek... One folder containing art files for a business card had 42 THOUSAND of these little invisible suckers... zero bytes... WHAT ARE THEY?? All of the file names are different, looks like its counting in hexadecimal?? All file names start with .dat
Sample file name: .dataa49.fff
or: .dat0b62.0a0

27" mid-2010 imac 3.2 GHx Intel Core i3 / 16 GB 1067 MHz DDR3 / OSX 10.9.5

Can I delete them before I turn everything back invisible???

Thank you, it's freaky... Not to mention killing workflow...

 

[honestone]

Do you have any software for making/processing business cards? Did you happen to subscribe (either "accidently" or purposely) for business cards?

If you have been making backups, then go ahead and delete one of those folders (especially one (or many)( that you do not recognize, and see what happens.

 

[sbranum]

Do you have any software for making/processing business cards? Did you happen to subscribe (either "accidently" or purposely) for business cards?

If you have been making backups, then go ahead and delete one of those folders (especially one (or many)( that you do not recognize, and see what happens.

No, we are a graphic design company, we do all our own artwork using Adobe Creative Suite CC 2014. The files are invisible and zero bytes...
I made a copy of the FOLDER, just in case, and I am deleting all the small FILES (42 thousand+) now... I will see whether this affects the use of the "real" files in that folder... I suspect it won't... But that doesn't answer the question of WHAT these files are, how they got there and what to do about them... I suspect there are hundreds of project folders with them in there! Thank you, though, I appreciate your comments... -s

 

[honestone]

No, we are a graphic design company, we do all our own artwork using Adobe Creative Suite CC 2014. The files are invisible and zero bytes...
I made a copy of the FOLDER, just in case, and I am deleting all the small FILES (42 thousand+) now... I will see whether this affects the use of the "real" files in that folder... I suspect it won't... But that doesn't answer the question of WHAT these files are, how they got there and what to do about them... I suspect there are hundreds of project folders with them in there! Thank you, though, I appreciate your comments... -s

That's GOOD! I made some possible suggestions as to WHERE those files could have came from, but on actuality, I have NO clue. As it is, sometimes in my Trash, on booting up, I'll see a FOLDER entitled "Recovered Files", and up until I looked at this (http://www.cnet.com/news/recovered-files-folder-appearing-in-the-trash/), I had no idea where they came from. As it is, I just Empty the Trash whenever it is there.