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In terminal my Volumes directory looks like this:

"Sanitized"-Computer:Volumes "sanatizedUserName"$ ls
Backup of "Sanitized"’s MacBook 	Macintosh HD
LaCie   				iDisk
LaCie-1

Somehow I have a duplicate "LaCie" drive and I can't access it to delete it. It is an Airport Drive. OS X must have a preference file somewhere it keeps of past network drives that I can delete.

It only mounts when the real drive is plugged in. I am afraid to delete this duplicate because it may delete real data.

I believe this "ghost" drive is screwing up my time machine backup.

Permissions:

"Sanitized"-Computer:Volumes "sanatizedUserName"$ ls -al
drwx------@ 26 root        wheel   840 Aug 10 18:41 LaCie-1

Thanks for any help.

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Mac OS X mounts drives by default by creating a folder with the name of the drive in /Volumes and then mounting it at that point (so a drive is normally accessible via /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE). Mac OS X will append a -# after the name of a hard drive if multiple drives of that name are mounted. (eg. /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE-1 and /Volumes/NAME_OF_DRIVE-2, etc.) This will also occur if a folder exists in /Volumes/ by that same name. Even though the mount point has a different name the name of the drive will show correctly in the Finder.

An example of what can cause an erroneous folder:

A script or application that writes a file to /Volumes/ExternalDrive/somefile.txt or even an application that when checking if a file exists (eg. open last saved document) creates a new document at that location when the hard drive/network share/USB key/etc. is not mounted. The file will exists at /Volumes/ExternalDrive/somefile.txt meaning the folder /Volumes/ExternalDrive will exist when you next mount.

Fixing this:

  • Ensure all drives have been unmounted - use Disk Utility or diskutil list to be sure
  • Check to see what can be seen in /Volumes/ - recommended to use the Terminal and use ls -laF /Volumes. There should only be one folder (NAME_OF_STARTUP_DRIVE -> /)
  • Delete the remaining folders. (I'd recommend checking the contents first)
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I know this is what happened: an app tried to write to the drive when it was disconnected. However, I had tried to delete this folder, but when time machine runs, it re-creates the folder. The "LaCie" folder has a minus sign (inaccessible). So it seems for some reason that Time Machine thinks that the backup is in "LaCie-1" not "LaCie". – Corey Floyd Aug 11 '09 at 6:38
I also deleted all Time Machine permisions (backupd and timemachine) and time machine STILL created the LaCie-1 folder. – Corey Floyd Aug 11 '09 at 6:39
I'd recommend unmounting the drives, remove any left over folders in /Volumes, turn off Time Machine then remount the Lacie drive and then re-select it using Time Machine. (Press Change Disk, change it to None, and then press Change again and select it properly) – Chealion Aug 11 '09 at 15:30
I have tried that numerous times. ...time machine always recreates the drive. – Corey Floyd Aug 12 '09 at 15:38
Is Time Machine saving your backups in a .sparseimage? – Chealion Aug 12 '09 at 16:27
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Ok, so I first turned off my drive to make sure nothing was deleted.

Then in terminal I typed:

sudo rm -rf Lacie-1

Great news, this works. I turned my drive back on and everything was fine.

I did find the cause however when I tried to do my time machine backup. Time Machine is actually creating this ghost drive for backups. I don't know why.

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It's creating Lacie-1 because /Volumes/Lacie already exists. It's not related to Time Machine but how Mac OS X mounts external mounts (eg. external hard drives, network shares, etc.) – Chealion Aug 11 '09 at 2:35
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