Disk on Key slowly getting smaller

[Dotan Cohen]

On 08/03/2008, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
> 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.

Interesting. Are you suggesting deleting the pics one at a time? What
if the drive contains files, not chronologically identifiable
pictures? How should one know in what order to delete?

This sounds related to _another_ bug that I've seen with cheap
flash-based mp3 players. They play the songs in the order that they
were copied to the device, not the alphabetical order or anything
logical like ID3 tag track order. So like you suggest, write order can
affect future disk operations.

Thanks for the tip.

Dotan Cohen

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A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
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