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Whenever I restart my MacBook Pro running OS X 10.6.8, I see a Recovered files folder in the trash—most recent example shown below. This is after a regular restart and not after a crash.

Any ideas why this keeps happening?

I'm not sure if this happens on every restart or just regularly. I'll have to investigate more to determine that.

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1 Answer

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Any file that isn't closed when the program terminates (or the mac crashes or is rebooted) gets flagged as a recovered file.

Usually these are temporary files and never intended by the program to be seen by you. Here are some links from Apple on this behavior:

It is only a problem if you lose work or feel the program should be exiting cleanly and not crashing. Have you looked into the console app to see if the programs are crashing or it's just a matter of shutting things down before the apps have a chance to clean up and quit in an orderly fashion.

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Prior to restarting my MBP, I exited all applications. They appeared to exit cleanly (i.e., they weren't frozen or not responding). – Matthew Rankin Jul 11 '11 at 21:37
Hmm - that really should clean them out. Have you tried a safe boot (or single user mode to run fsck by hand before anything mounts) I would expect other shenanigans if the file system were having errors - but it's worth a shot... – bmike♦ Jul 11 '11 at 22:24
@bmike Your link is broken - do you remember what it was to try to search for a new URL? – CajunLuke Jul 2 '12 at 17:03

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