Archive > Backup & Recovery
Cleaning Junk Files
Introduction:
Computer programs often need hundreds or thousands of individual files to work. When a user loads such programs, it creates some files that support the execution of the program and the data that it temporarily needs. Ideal software efficiently uses these temporary files and cleans them on exit. But there is no ideal software, so some junk data gets left on the disk.
Sometimes system crashes or software runtime errors may cause the execution to stop immediately without allowing clean up action. This may lead to scattering of unwanted temporary files on your hard drive. This scattering of files occupies more space which lowers the system performance. Normally, the system uses part of the hard drive memory as swapped main memory.
The increasing in temporary files leads to shrink of swapping area done by pagefile.sys, and decreases the system performance. The second drawback of the junk files is scattering files all over the hard drive. This increases the size of the indexing file of the disk partition. The increase in indexing file makes the search of a particular file using windows search utility much slower. Moreover, continued scattering of junk files makes other files highly fragmented over the drive. This fragmentation creates significant movement of the physical arm of the hard drive and thus slows down the system performance.
The junk files are mostly with the on of TMP suffix or a tilde (~), such as myfile.tmp or ~myfile.dat. These temporary files are safe to delete. Some more common files are created by applications are BAK files. These are the files called backup which may be required in the near future in restoring the old status. So there may be harm in deleting these files. The application program which creates the BAK file also failed to remove them. So the user must take decision that the file is to be deleted or not according to the application usability of the user. Some files to look for are the BAK are BAT files. These files are called batch files do some automation jobs, like automatic execution of files in start-up in autoexec.bat. So don’t delete these files until you are fully sure to delete it.
Normally windows stores the temporary files in the temp folder in the root drive. We can access this directory by clicking run in start and type “%temp%, this temporary directory consists of all temporary files created during the application execution. It is safe to delete these files during windows shutdown or during restart. If we try to delete these files during middle of some process, may restrict to delete these due to sharing of files by the application. So deleting these files may cause harm to the application. Some other types of junk files are internet caches which are created during surfing internet. These catches also causes leave junk files.
Utilities to delete junk files:
Windows comes with a basic clean up utility called disk cleanup. To access this click start -> All programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> Disk Cleanup. This launches a utility helps to remove tmp files including temporary internet files, application debug data, and other junk in the system. We can select which files are to be cleaned because some internet caches lead to loss of saved histories and cookies which closes all logged sessions in surfing sites.
The third party utility called ccleaner is a freeware utility that helps a great in removing temporary files. Sometimes there may problem in ejecting a flash drive from the system. This is due to sharing of temporary files from the flash drive. This can also be rectified by clearing all temporary files from the system using ccleaner which ease the ejection of pen drive.
