BleepingComputer.com: Can I Delete These Files?

G'day people. Vista Premium SP1. I use Powerdesk 6 file manager .I have just found this info. on my hard disk.

C:\Users\Owner\Searches\Everywhere.search-ms\*.* has 33760 objects taking up
9.94G space which is a quarter of disk space free on the C drive. Can I safely delete this lot and free up some space? Thank you.
cheers stan

Hi Stan

I am not familiar with that app or location, but as it does not appear to have any relation to the operating system I would guess it would be safe to delete as that is a ridiculous amount of room to be taken up.

Cheers

The location is the default area where Vista keeps searches - but on my Vista system there isn't anything for Everywhere.search-ms (although it does have an Everywhere category).

I'd suggest checking the contents of the files inside of that directory. That's an awful lot of searching to be stored on your hard drive.

Thanks for your reply Usasma... it seems (when I use Windows explorer to look at things) that the directory C:\...\searches contains all the folders and files on my hard drive. As a test I deleted some files from C:\users\owner\searches and they were deleted from the hard drive. What the is going on , I wonder?

I'm not real familiar with the search function in Vista (actually, I hate it!) - but it seems that the results are some sort of link to the actual files/folders that you've searched for (probably for ease of access).

As with any deletions, I always suggest that the files in question be moved elsewhere. Then, if they turn out to be necessary, you can just move them back. If they're not needed in a couple of weeks, you can delete them to the Recycle Bin - where they'll hang out until they're forced out by other deletions (providing a bit more time to recover them - just in case).

stanf, on Sep 6 2008, 05:09 PM, said:

I'm not a Vista expert, but I gather that Vista saves searches in virtual folders, which "appear" to contain all the files which resulted from the search. A *.* search of the entire C: drive will naturally contain all the files on the drive. However all the files are still in their original locations. A virtual folder just contains pointers to the locations of the files, the same as the home folders that normally show those files as being in them.

So there's no space to be gained by trying to delete the files in the search folder, as they are actually the same files, just being shown grouped together differently. In fact deleting a file from here does delete the file from the hard drive, just like deleting it from its home folder would.

Think of it as the results window of a search being saved as a folder. The files shown in the search window occupy no extra space, but if you delete one, the actual file is deleted. A search folder is just that search saved, and behaves in the same way.

Thank you all for the input. I guess what is puzzling me is why every change i make, ie every time I save a file or a web page or whatever, it is automatically added to the C:\....\searches\everywhere folder and also to the next folder down which is c:\...\searches\indexed locations. I have unchecked the box in the C: properties which says index this drive. cheers stan