5
2
WD My Cloud NAS added hidden .wdmc folders to every folder with a jpg without notifying or asking me first. There are many hundreds on my NAS drive. It has something to do with their media server but I never turned that feature on. These folders are packed with data that bloats my backups and disk space usage. They have to be deleted but they are all over the disk and sometimes deep inside directory structures.
On Superuser.com I found this advice, ran it in Terminal, and it appeared to spend all night deleting these folders. However, it didn't delete the target folders or the data in them.
$ find . -type d -name '.wdmc' -print -exec echo rm -rf {} \;
I also found this but it only worked for folders with no spaces in the name:
rm -rf `find . -type d -name .wdmc`
Somehow in the path there must be a way to escape the spaces in folder names?
I'm going to post the solution, if any, in my Amazon review for WD My Cloud NAS disks. My guess is that a lot of the product's 5 star reviews would be much less if users saw the mess that it causes. – Preston – 2014-08-05T22:31:47.670
I finally gave up and used the second statement above to remove directories within folder trees when all folders had no spaces in the names. Then I used find . -type d -name .wdmc to find the remaining files, which was most of them, copied the results from Terminal to a text editor so I could narrow my search then used Finder with hidden files exposed to delete them. This ate piles of time but saved over 200 GB of space, made moving and deleting folders faster, and made cloud backup vastly faster. I detest Western Digital. – Preston – 2014-08-06T23:40:11.127