FILES ARE BLANK IN WINDOWS ( ._ FILES )
When you open your folder you may see duplicate files which start with ._
._ files are created automatically by Mac OS X and contain metadata related to the accompanying file that was placed there by programs in the Mac. ( All my work is created on a Mac, so this will happen if you open them on PC. ) These are invisible files.
Deleting these files is not advised because they contain information that could not be supported by the file format that is presented as for your computer. This information is referenced by programs when their associated files are opened on the Mac OS.
Macs will split extra information for files into these ._ files (since the drive type being used in these cases is not Mac-specific).
.DS_Store Files Beyond the creation of resource fork files, OS X is notorious for cluttering windows-formatted volumes with other hidden files, such as trash folders and the irritating ".DS_Store" files which hold folder-specific settings.
These files can be created even when users just browse a windows volume, and while they may be invisible to Macintosh users, Windows users will see them created all over the place. Fortunately, deleting these files manually will not harm anything, but it can be very annoying to users to have these files constantly appearing.
There are several ways to manage these hidden files, and prevent them from occurring.
How do we get rid of them?
Files starting with periods in Mac and Linux are made hidden automatically, but Windows doesn't handle period-prefixed files this way. So the recommendation (rather than deleting these files) would be to make them hidden in Windows as well.
There are a few ways to do this, but first make sure you have Folder Options set to "Don't show Hidden Files, Folders, or Drives".
- Open Start
- Type in "Folder Options" and run this program
- Go to the View tab
- Set the radio button to "Don't show Hidden Files, Folders, or Drives"
- Click OK
Once done verifying this, either of these two options will walk you through hiding files/folders that you no longer wish to see in Windows:
- If you see just a few files or folders beginning with a period (.) or period-underscore (._), you can right-click the file/s and select Properties. Then check/enable the Hidden checkbox and click OK.
- Or, if you'd rather run a command that causes all files and folders beginning with a period (to include period-underscore files) to become invisible, open Command Prompt, then run this:
attrib +H J:\.* /S /D(but be sure to change the drive from J to the drive letter of your choice)
Note that this attrib option will run through every file and folder on your drive, so this could take quite a long time, depending on the size of your disk.
Use a third party app to hide the files.
Unfortunately there is no way of preventing the resource fork from being saved as a secondary file. However, if too many of them are being created then users can use third-party utilities to locate and remove the files. BlueHarvest is a popular and cheap program that can manage hidden files created by OS X.
Save the file in an updated format
Since resource forks are a legacy way of storing file information, users can try updating the file format to a more modern one. Users would have to open the document in a program that can properly read it, and then re-save it. For instance, if an old ".doc" Word document has a resource fork, loading it into the latest version of Word and saving it in the new ".docx" format should remove the resource fork.