Ive a strange file on my hard drive with no name

Appears to be a bug: http://www.openradar.me/23549929

From the description there, it is a plist for local snapshots from Time Machine.

My guess is the UUID matches the UUID for your hard drive.

Sound like that article indicates it will come back, but you could try. I don't know if Time Machine is using it or if it is some artifact.

I have that question, too. I tried to make it invisible using Pathfinder but I couldn't. I tried to temporarily change the owner from root to myself as user to make it invisible but I could not change the owner.

Have you successfully deleted it? Did it come back?

What is "OCD" ? And what do you mean by "messing with" – what are the implications?

Anyway, in a leap of faith, I deleted it. Time Machine still worked. Before that, I tried to find out which device that UUID was attributed to and I did a full search on my Mac, including invisible files and searching inside files. As search term I put in that UUID and I used the free search app EasyFind from DEVON. No result.

Well, so far, a day later, all is good ... and the file did not come back.

I must add that I have made a full clone of my computer on a backup drive beforehand. Also, I copied the text of that file into a personal note.

A simpler approach is to use Launchpad : Other : Disk Utility to find a possible drive UUID. Select the drive(s) in the left column, and click Info on the Disk Utility toolbar. There will be a UUID assigned to the physical drive, and one to each partition of it.

If you are Terminal inclined:

$ df | grep disk | awk '{printf "%s\t%s\n", $1, $9}'

# use the following for each disk found to check the UUID value. The following is for OS X installed on disk0s2.

$ diskutil info /dev/disk0s2 | grep UUID

So far zero problems after having deleted that file. I used my Mac intensely in lot's of scenarios. I conclude that it's absolutely safe to trash this. Still, for total peace of mind, please always have a backup of your drive which should go without saying.

@ VikingOSX: thank you for this cool tip. I could not find which drive was the culprit for my file. It seems that the UUID is more of a system identifier than a hardware ID, so when newly installing a system that number changes?

The UUID is unique, assigned ID to each drive, including fresh out of the box drives like my recent addition of a Toshiba as a Time Machine drive.

No instructions of mine in this thread suggested moving any folder to the Trash. If the folder is still in your Trash, then using the Finder, select that folder, right-click on it and choose Put back.

If your Trash was emptied, the you might consider using the Time Machine Restore application in the Dock to get the most recent instance of that folder back to its original location, and then see if that appeases Time Machine.

@ Nickholl: I guess you just made a typo. Because that file is on the top level and as far as I remember it was not inside of any folder. So you did not trash a folder, I would assume. If you have trashed that file and now experience Time Machine problems, then this can be related to something different. I'm saying this because I trashed that same type of file (no name, same file contents except different UUID) and I do not see any Time Machine issues.

Consider making regular full backups (clones) on other drives (I use the app SuperDuper, there's also Carbon Copy Cloner) and consider running the app DiskWarrior to ensure a healthy file system.

Time Machine occasionally acts funny. Wait a day and it may just work later. If all fails, reset Time Machine and do a new backup. You could turn Time Machine off, then restart the Mac, then turn Time Machine back on. I'm confident that it will work again at some point.