Deleted folders reappear after reboot!?
 

Hello to everyone here!
It's been a while I posted anything here on linuxquestions.org

I have a problem determining why some folders that I deleted long ago reappear after every reboot and even while machine is working. I noticed that this happens because of akonadi, strigi and nepomuk. I'm little bit confused with those three so I disabled them, at least I think I did. However, specific and folders are
keep reappearing still. Also, just for a note, those directories are empty or they contain empty directories recursively. If someone could give me a hint or a reference how to solve this.
I'm using Slackware 13.1

Can you please be more specific about what folders exactly are reappearing?

Those are folders that I created in my /home directory and some on fat partition.

So these are not directories related to the three services or any other system directories?

No they are not.

One thing that I recommend is using "fsck" to check the filesystems containing the folders. I have run into similar problems when journal information for the filesystem is incorrect. The journal may end up being re-applied every time that you mount the filesystem and then may never be completely processed and deleted.

It could be that KDE services are mounting the filesystem and indirectly triggering the creation of the folders.

Yes Erik_FL, this is an issue that I've been thinking of. But how to end up this problem with faulty journaling of filesystem. I'm having this problem for about 1 year and I was thinking of installing a newer Slack 13.37, however I
would like to find out the reason why this is happening to have a knowledge for how to solve this issue in future.

A journal recreating the could be the issue, but definitely not for folders on a FAT filesystem, since that filesystem has no journal.
May it be possible that those folders where use to store data with an application, like a download folder for Firefox, or that an application stores its settings in it and therefore they are created automatically when the application is started?

I have dual boot machine. On Linux I have my /home partition which is reiserfs and I'm using it from first time that
I installed my first Slackware but then again I decided to give a try with ext4 on / and /boot partitions. So those two are ext4 and /home is old reiserfs. I use jdownloader and it creates folders whenever I download something and this is located in /home directory, however I have created manually one folder at fat partition. I deleted some folders that
jdownloader created as well as this one at fat partition and they just spawn again after reboot and sometimes even without rebooting. So it appears that whether an application created folders or I did create some, same thing happens.
I delete them - they spawn again totally empty.

Can you post the exact names of the folders and also note which are on each kind of filesystem? Perhaps someone will recognize them, or be able to find information by searching for the names.

Sometimes the only way to solve problems is through the process of elimination. Try to make some educated guesses about what programs might be creating the folders, and then disable them from running or uninstall them.

You may find useful information by doing a "grep" command to search for files containing the directory names. Those are likely to be configuration files and the name of the file may give you a clue as to the application. Be careful not to use "grep" on the "/dev" folder, since it will be quite slow and might cause other problems by accessing the devices. A good folder to start with is "/etc" since many configuration files reside there. You can either use the option on "grep" to search sub-directories, or use the "find" command to execute "grep" on the files that it finds.

Look at the dates and times of the folders and see if they correspond to any specific activities that you remember doing. You may also want to look for files with a similar date and time. Look in "/var/tmp" and use "grep" there to see if the directory names are mentioned in a log file.

Modify the permissions on the folders to deny access to everyone except root and then see if a program or service complains. To do that on FAT you will probably have to use the folder as a mount point and then set the mount permissions to deny access. FAT does not have file permissions, and only has a "read-only" attribute. The "read-only" attribute for folders might be ignored, since Windows now uses it as a "customized folder" flag.

You can install a second copy of Linux or backup up your current Linux to restore later. Install a fresh copy of Linux. Then install the applications you frequently use, one at a time to see if the folders start appearing. Once you have determined what creates the folders, you can restore or modify your normal Linux system to fix the problem. I've often found it useful to play around with a test copy of an operating system to investigate problems.

You can install Linux in a virtual machine using VirtualBox. If you like, you can make a virtual disk containing a copy of your current Linux system. Keep a backup copy of the virtual disk file in case your experimentation breaks something in the OS. The backup copy is a way to start out with a known configuration of Linux again.