Spotlight-V100 and Trashes Folders On USB Flash Drives

A friend of mine contacted me recently with a problem that he could not figure out on his own. He discovered that two hidden folders had been created on his USB flash drive. One folder was named .spotlight-V100 while the other was named .trashes. This puzzled him as he was certain that they were not created by him or any program that he used to work with. A quick research on the Internet solved the problem.

The .spotlight-v100 and .trashes folders were created automatically by an Apple Macintosh computer system that the USB flash drive was plugged in before. These two folders are automatically created whenever a USB flash drive is connected to a computer system running an Apple Mac operating system. Spotlight is a indexing process on the Mac that will save the information that are gathered in the .spotlight-v100 directory.

The .trashes folder on the other hand is simply a trash folder for the specific drive which is also created by Apple Macintosh computer systems. Windows users can simply delete both hidden directories to free up disk space.

There is however no need to worry that these two folders have been created by malicious software.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Wednesday August 19, 2009 -
Tags:folders, macintosh, spotlight-v100, spotlight-v100 folder, trashes, trashes folder, usb flash drive

Responses so far:

1. 'cheryl says:

   August 20, 2009 at 7:56 pm

   that’a really helpful. (: thanks you help me solved my problem too (:
   good day to you.

   Reply
2. Machine Translation says:

   November 20, 2009 at 7:26 pm

   Thanks you. Useful information.

   Reply
3. raimong says:

   November 21, 2009 at 8:03 pm

   hi,

   i have this in my external hard drive as well. i remember copying files from my friend who has a macbook. so most likely that caused the creation of these folders.

   my concern is this: when i used my hard drive in my machine in the office, our antivirus said my hard drive has malware. that freaked me out. if i have .trashes and .spotlight-v100 in my office machine, can i also delete them? will it not affect my machine’s performance? i’m using windows xp btw.

   Reply
4. Emeric says:

   December 8, 2009 at 6:42 pm

   Is it possible to disable with an option on the mac to prevent the creation of these files ?

   Reply
5. cc says:

   December 9, 2009 at 11:28 am

   thanks. it was helpful :)

   Reply
6. jj says:

   February 2, 2010 at 1:13 pm

   thanks, this was useful, I just found the two hidden olders and didn1t know if I can delete them or not. Thanks!

   Reply
7. windows says:

   April 13, 2010 at 3:35 am

   but i have a file with name U¬U¬ in it . I think because of this file i cant delete spotlight and trashes.
   Please find me a way to delete it.

   Reply
8. alex says:

   June 15, 2010 at 1:02 am

   i have recently “lost” most of my data from 2 external hdds after connecting them to a w-lan usb remote hub (md86097). the only files that are visible on the hdd is the .spotlight-V100 the .trashes and 2 files ._. trashes and d26.tmp.

   my system is vista.

   dose any one have ideas as to retreaving my data

   much apreciation
   alex

   Reply
9. Cosmética y belleza says:

   October 30, 2010 at 11:59 am

   But can we remove or not this 2 files on my USb key?

   Reply
10. Andreas says:

    November 23, 2010 at 5:49 pm

    Thank you, good to know.

    Reply
11. fred says:

    January 5, 2011 at 10:20 pm

    Very Helpful. Thanks!!

    Reply
12. vicky says:

    January 26, 2011 at 7:29 am

    Thanks, very helpful.

    Have a good one.

    Reply
13. john says:

    February 7, 2011 at 2:54 pm

    Thank you for the clear explanation.
    To Alex with lost data, if still lost, and you have not overwritten the discs with more up to date files, contact me on ahah95@gmail.com with “alex lost” in the subject and a phone number and i will help you. AH

    Reply
14. richard says:

    March 29, 2011 at 2:23 pm

    Deleting the files will not make any difference..
    If you need to send data from a MAC to a PC then it will simply make the ‘hidden’ folders again, it cannot be helped as the MAC automatically produces these so it can handle the data correctly.

    Not a virus, nor will it take up much space on a external storage device, it is simply there to help :)

    Reply
15. Bob says:

    April 21, 2011 at 11:35 pm

    Spot(light) on description for us non-Macites. Thank you, /s/ Bob (pun intended ;).

    Reply
16. Vaughan says:

    April 27, 2011 at 1:25 pm

    Thanks Martin

    Just re-installed a fresh system on laptop and two home PC’s and there is a virus going around that hides in hidden files so I was most relieved to read your advice

    Reply
17. kiers says:

    August 20, 2011 at 11:05 am

    It’s NOT just about Mac Computers. I have an UBUNTU system where i often have to share the thumb drive on the road with public windows computers. My thumb drive picked up this .trashes nonsense along with .spotlight v100 folders. despite NEVER having connected to a Mac!! THESE ARE FAT filesystem viruses.

    Reply
18. Anonymous says:

    November 3, 2011 at 8:19 pm

    this article is very useful. thnx

    Reply