Items from external harddrives automatically being put in trash

Dialabrain -

First, thanks for taking the time to try and help me. Second, I have no idea if my hard drives have pre-installed software. They are seagate portable hard drives. You just plug them in and they are ready to go.

I've been playing around with them since I posted my question. Ejecting them and plugging them in one by one. Each time I plug one in, something...not everything on the drive...gets moved to the trash. When ejected, the trash goes back to empty. Only one of the drives is close to being full, the other 2 are not even a quarter full, if that. Also, two of these drives I've been using for several years with no issues. Only one is new, and it didn't do this when first plugged in. This all started this week for some reason.

Additionally...and I don't know if this will help pinpoint the problem...when I plugged one of the drives in, it only had two pictures from it show up in the trash. I went ahead and emptied the trash to see if it would delete the pictures from my portable hard drive. It did not. They still show up there. When the portable hard drive is unplugged and plugged back in, those pictures do not show up in the trash anymore but are still on hard drive. So, I guess this isn't a life or death situation. If one of the drives didn't have over 3 million items to delete, I guess I could just delete everything. That makes me too nervous, however. I'll just make sure I eject the portable hard drives before emptying the trash.

If you have any ideas on how/why this happened and anything I can do to correct the situation, I'm all ears (eyes).

Thanks again.

Tony

Well...I think you were on to something in your original post. The 3 million items appears to be coming from a folder titled 'backups.backup.db' which I assume is my Time Machine Back up files (?).

Dwb -

Thanks to you as well for your assistance. Very interesting and helpful tip about how the internal trash system works on the portable hard drives. It's very possible (probable) that I put something into the trash and then unmounted it before emptying the trash. I'll keep working to see if anything can be done at this point. I'm up for suggestions if anyone has any.

Again, thanks for the help.

Tony

Well, the problem with deleting the portable hard drive trash with the backup files in it is this: it has so much stuff in it that it either freezes on "preparing to empty the trash" or, if it gets past that (it takes almost 4 hours to get to the point where it actually starts deleting things), it stops deleting every 5 minutes to say it can't delete something because it is in use. It would take me until the end of days to keep clicking "skip" or "continue" every time it stops. If I could delete things individually once they show up in the trash, I might have a fighting chance (doing things the way I'm doing them...which I'm sure is incorrect). But it seems that cannot be done.

Dialabrain -

Well, in my infinite wisdom, that was the very first thing I did. I saw the trash was full, clicked "empty trash" and watched the fun begin as it began it's count up to 3 million things (after two freeze up attempts). That's when I thought I'd better seek professional help...which is where we are now. As I'm sure you've figured out, I am not computer professional...by any means.

Well...that worked...kind of. When right clicking on each item, I wasn't given an option of "put back" but I was offered "delete immediately" which worked. Almost. I was able to delete everything that the portable hard drive was putting in the trash except for the folder taking up all the space: the backup folder. When I tried to delete that, it made me type in my administrator password (something it did not ask me to do when I deleted everything else) and then told me that I did not have permission to delete the item. I realize that this probably opens up a worm hole of trial and error to figure out how to delete this file without reformatting the hard drive. I guess I could move everything I don't want to delete off the drive, reformat, then move everything back? Also, I'm not sure exactly how to reformat the drive. Is that an easy process? Thoughts at this point?