How to i make a folder hidden?

my external hdd has all my music on it now (took forever to format and get it all together but thats another story)

i formatted using windows and partition magic and put some music on it using a pc and some using my mbp

now there are folders called system volume information right when i enter the drives

do i need these files (can i delete them?) or how can i hide these they are rather annoying to me

thanks for any help

 

Just right-click on the folder and go to properties, then put a tic in the "Hidden" check box. You will need to set your folder options to NOT show hidden files and folders, though. Otherwise, the folders will still show up as transparent icons.

 

on a mac? lol i dont see properties on here, i see get info but thats about it

 

Doh! That's what I get for browsing by thread title instead of by forum section. My apologies for giving you useless Windows information. Of course, you could always hook the external drive up to a Windows box and do exactly what I said above .

I did a quick Google search as penance and find a potentially useful link on how to hide files and folders on a Mac:
http://lifehacker.com/software/privacy/how-to-hide-files-and-folders-on-a-mac-222606.php

I also found a program called Altomac that is designed specifically to hide files and folders:
http://www.altomac.com/

 

You need to use Terminal (Applications --> Utilities) to create a folder that begins with a period (.). The command is "mkdir .NameOfYourFolder" without the quotation marks and obviously replace "NameOfYourFolder" with something else.

More Information Here. Read this link so you'll be able to find the hidden folder you just created .

Commands to Show/Hide Hidden Files.

And as a general warning, don't mess around with other hidden files/folders!

 

ah thanks guys, too bad its not as easy as windows
any info on, if these sort of files/folders are are needed/necessary?

thanks again =)

 

That's sort of missing the point though, he was asking for how to hide existing folders from view, not how to create a folder that's hidden

In general however (as Xander stated above), the system will treat files and folders that start with a . (dot) as "hidden" meaning they will not show up in Finder unless you enabled it to show hidden files. If the file you don't want to see does not start with a period, renaming it to have a period in front of the name will just mean that the next time something looks for that file it will replace it with a new one because it can't find the old one (name changed).

 

Is there a better way to keep people out of your files on a mac compared to windows? Is there a way to add a password to folders?

 

I thought it would be easiest to create a hidden folder, then move the files you wanted to hide into it. And that way if you did mess something up, it would also be easier to reverse your actions.

If you want to rename the individual files/folders you can certainly do that too. First you need to navigate to the directory where the files are that you want to rename (use the change directory command "cd") then use "mv name .name" to rename the file or folder (replace "name" with the actual folder/file name).

More Information on Commands

 

An easy way to put passwords on stuff is to create a disk image with a password on it. Whevener you need to access it just mount it, put in the password then do whatever, eject when done. I'd say its an easy way to do put passwords on stuff, and you dont need any other programs.