MacOS Catalina duplicating files on save

Question

I'm a software developer and I constantly need to save files of course. The problem I'm experiencing right now is that intermittently my laptop creates new files of the ones I'm saving/compiling. I'll provide an example in a minute. My thought initially was that perhaps this is due to some file permissions I'm not looking at. I've had this laptop for a couple of months now and this is the only problem I've encountered. It has happened on both Visual Studio Code and Atom. I also thought this was because of the language I'm using but it also happening with NodeJS applications I've worked with. And while this does not cause any malfunction, it is very annoying every time I need to compile a project my terminal screen is super cluttered with errors because these files are not valid.

The errors go like this

[error] beam/beam_load.c(1433): Error loading module 'Elixir.Poison.Encoder.FileName 4':

So it creates files like the one above but replace '4' with whatever number it decides to put, it can be 1, 2, 3, 4, and so on... I've deleted the build directory of my projects to get rid of the error but it is only temporary. Thanks in advance and let me know what else I can provide to make this easier to debug.

Answer 1

Do you save these files in iCloud Drive? To prevent data loss, iCloud will sometimes resolve sync issues by making a copy with a number on the end that holds the alternate file contents.

There is no way to avoid this, since it's a data consistency measure. You can keep your source code outside of iCloud Drive – I myself have a folder outside of iCloud specifically for Git repositories that are stored elsewhere.