[X4U] while trying to track

[Jerry Krinock]

on 05/09/17 09:41, Jan Melichar at janmel at mac.com wrote:

> 
> On 17 Sep 2005, at 13:46, Jerry Krinock wrote:
> 
>> on 05/09/16 09:17, Jan Melichar at janmel at mac.com wrote:
>> 
>> 
>>> strange behaviour on my G5 I notice a lot of empty folders with
>>> 'names' such as '§`' and '©¥\'. Is this part of Tiger's charm or
>>> something amiss?
>>> 
>> 
>> I'd call it a "feature".  It is a warning to check your backup
>> practices and
>> make sure you are prepared for a hard drive failure.
>> 
> 
> Thanks for the comment Jerry - yes I had guesses that something was
> amiss! I'm sorry for the implicit rather than explicit question -

I thought the question was great which is why I gave such a great answer :))

> It's immensely useful to be able to work on the same files in
> different places without having to drag a powerbook around but if the
> iDisk is causing these time consuming problems it's value is somewhat
> reduces which is why I'm keen to identify causes which might enable
> me to make sensible decisions about the way I organise myself.

I'm not familiar with iDisk, but I believe it does the file backup that you
need to be doing.  Or possibly iDisk is backing up continuously, in other
words it may read and write off the network whenver you open or save a file.

If the latter, then keep it on so that when/if your hard drive does fail,
your files, as you last saw them, will be safe on Apple's server somewhere.
If the former, then be careful because if your hard drive corrupts the data
on Monday, copies the corrupt files to iDisk on Tuesday, then fails on
Wednesday, all you've got is corrupt data on the Apple server....unless
iDisk archives your data for several weeks, then you've still got the data
although it may take some time to find it.

So, I think you need to (1) find out and understand exactly what iDisk is
doing for you (2) look at some of these ^%$*^ files and figure out if they
are corrupt versions of some little-used data (3) consider purchasing
AppleCare if you don't have it and it's still available for your machine
(less than 1 year old).