lost+found, whats it for?

Fahrvergnuugen

Fahrvergnuugen

I am the law!
Can someone explain to me what the lost+found directory is for? I see some files in there that exist in other locations on my hard disk. Can I manually empty it out?
 
It's on my G4 as well, I'm sure you must have it... I think its always been part of OSX (and other *nix systems), this is just the first I've ever noticed anything in it.
 
Nope, don't have it. Just fired up my PB with Panther and it's not on that either. Sounds like maybe something installed that for you, but not Panther.
Could possibly be from DW or Postfix.
 
fsck will create a lost+found directory itself if it encounters anything that it should put in there.

Guess I haven't had fsck do that on either of my machines.
 
Its on my G4 and my G5 but not on my girl friends iMac. All are running Panther. I wonder if its created once you have a crash...
 
also, when i ran disk utility to try and repair my startup disk, it said "checking lost+found for .... " i can't remember the rest.
 
Fahrvergnuugen said:
Can someone explain to me what the lost+found directory is for? I see some files in there that exist in other locations on my hard disk. Can I manually empty it out?
Click to expand...

I have seen a Lost and Found folder on occasion, (starting years ago, Mac OS 7.something) usually after Norton Utilities tries to do a file recovery, and finds files that it cannot trace, these are Lost files that were Found and placed in that directory. You should determine if any can be traced to a particular app, and reload that app. I agree, perhaps a result of bad files and FSCK (although I would think it will be Norton or another 3rd party utility that does this)

I would verify that these files in Lost and Found are same or older versions of files that you really have somewhere else, and they could be trashed.
 
I think it comes from fsck or a crash. Norton's would have a folder you could trace.
 
its NOT from norton as this directory exists on varying types of *nix
I've been told that lost+found is where Unix filesystems put recovered data.
 
Fahrvergnuugen said:
its NOT from norton as this directory exists on varying types of *nix
I've been told that lost+found is where Unix filesystems put recovered data.
Click to expand...

Norton also creates this dictionary from time to time (at least it used to, don't know if Norton file recovery process does this differently now.)
That directory would be created as a result of 'lost' files from a recovery process (whatever does it) and the creation date for the folder could be useful for determining when problems caused the folder creation (it's not part of the original install, but created on an as-needed basis)
 
haha you guys are so mac. The lost+found directory is created when you *nix box crashes. What happens is the computer takes some files that it has in it's memory and puts it in the lost+found directory so you can view later to see if you need them or not.

"Orphaned files and directories (allocated,in-use but unreferenced) are reconnected by placing them in the lost+found directory.The name
assigned is the inode number."



That's what I get from my man page. Hopefully you all never see a lost+found directory. ;)
 
Wal Hydroglow We is all hyar jest tryin' t'larn. ah thunk it was fum fsck o' a crash as ah said above. Thanks fo' th' info'mashun. Keep it a-comin'. :)
 
Hydroglow said:
haha you guys are so mac. The lost+found directory is created when you *nix box crashes. What happens is the computer takes some files that it has in it's memory and puts it in the lost+found directory so you can view later to see if you need them or not.

"Orphaned files and directories (allocated,in-use but unreferenced) are reconnected by placing them in the lost+found directory.The name
assigned is the inode number."



That's what I get from my man page. Hopefully you all never see a lost+found directory. ;)
Click to expand...

Yup, we be a'Mac-in' here bouts. Just pointing out that *nix is not the only possible source for lost+found. Yeah, finding a lost+found folder (created by whatever) is not really a happy sign :)
 
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