Stop Finder/OSX From creating TemporaryItems and .apdisk on Network shares

Solution 1:

1. Open Terminal.
2. Execute this command: defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true
3. Either restart the computer or log out and back in to the user account.

Reference: http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1629

Solution 2:

If you are running Windows file shares on Windows Server 2003 R2 and above, you can create file screens that prevent any user from creating any set of pre-specificied files.

I have effectively used this approach to eliminate all mac created files on our file shares.

Please see the MS Technet document, Screening Files, for more information.

Solution 3:

While this might not help everyone, if you are running samba on the file server, you can add the following in your smb.conf:

Veto files = /.TemporaryItems/._.TemporaryItems/.DS_Store/

The "Veto files" is a / separated string of filenames (wildcards also allowed) that is forbidden to be created. This resolved the issue for me.

I found this trick on the Arch Linux samba wiki

Solution 4:

BlueHarvest is probably the best and easiest way to maintain the network shares clean, at least that's what I went for after taking up most of your options myself.

After that is a cron job for deleting all of those files, using something like:

find "$@" \( -name ".DS_Store" -or -name ".TemporaryItems" -or -name ".Trashes" -or -name "._*" \) -exec rm -rf "{}" \; -prune