Disk on Key slowly getting smaller

[Gene Heskett]

On Saturday 08 March 2008, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
>On Saturday 08 March 2008, Dotan Cohen wrote:
>> I thought that maybe parts of it were going bad, and the bad sectors
>> were not being used, but a Windows reformat restores the space.
>
>I'll have to watch more closely.  I've seen the .Trash or whatever directory
>eat up space when I thought I was deleting stuff, but wasn't.  I don't think
>I've ever noticed any missing space after taking care of this issue.
>
>I would have suspected something like you did, about bad sectors.
>
>Who knows.  It's very possible there's some insidious bug with vfat that
>causes this problem.
>
>--
>D. Michael McIntyre

There is one bug that I ran into in my camera, which is a vfat file system, 
and it duplicates the actual messydos bug in fact.

When deleting files, ALWAYS start at the end of the directory listing.  Why?  
Well, if you have 40 pix on the card, and you do an mv starting at the top of 
the list, and you clear out a full 'sector', vfat uses that as an end of 
directory indicator.  The rest of your pix will disappear and become 
in-accessable, but the space is still allocated.  The only fix is to take 
your lumps and format the card, and don't do that again.  Someone suggested 
taking another pix, but I've only been able to make that work once, the next 
time the card was trashed.  It was too small anyway.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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