What would be the result(s) of deleting the contents of the Temporary Internet Files directory in my XP SP3 machine before doing a backup? These files (many of 0 byte length) are making my whole-disk backup painfully slow.
Jim Hawkins
On Saturday 09 November 2013 20:32 Jim Hawkins wrote in uk.d-i-y:
Can you put an exclusion in on the backup system?
But to answer the oprinal question, it's probably safe.
The "correct way" (TM) to find out is to rename the directory so you can put it back if it breaks :)
I delete mine several times a week. Only the RSS reader generates them Opera and Firfox don't; IE is blocked by the firewall and also not allowed to run at all). The index.dat is erased on restart. CCleaner seems to be the best. I set it up by using Analyze, seeing what was found, then ticking one box and seeing what extra there was. There's an add-on for CCleaner that includes far more apps. as well.
In message , Jim Hawkins writes
Deleting them is an option both in Internet Explorer and 'Disk Cleanup' (and probably 6 other places in XP), so I think you can safely get rid of them.
There is very little in Windows you can't safely delete! :-) Certainly any temp directory is fair game and, for some, a positive boon as windows does choke on very full folders. The current user temp directory is worth emptying regularly, something like:
users and documents\\local\temp
And:
Or run CCleaner regularly, or before each backup.
+1
What a sad thread.
Go ahead and delete these temp files.
Disable prefetch while your at it. There are (slight hyperbole) millions of YouTube vids on optimizing/speeding up windows go watch some.
DO A BACKUP BEFORE EXPERIMENTING.
What backup software are you using, would an offline image based backup be better? Like clonezilla?
I've tried disabling Prefetch. It works, of course, but booting is slower and a bit inconsistent so I've settled for boot on and apps off as apps seem to be better without Prefetch. When I update something big or change major items (F/W; AV etc.) I clear Prefetch otherwise it's looking for things that don't exist.
Every so often I clone the HDD to another two HDDs and it's best to clear Prefetch before and after that. I don't know what happens, but the clone will tell me that it can't find some things, so I guess that the Prefetch is linked to the volume's ID - or summat.
Download CCleaner run it ... remove all stuff you don't need then do back up.
There is a whole load of stuff it will clear out not just temporary files.
Also run the registry fix in the same app (I always select option to save backup of that)
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