Can I have "too many" files in a folder? Do these get deleted by the computer?

Hello I'm new, thanks for looking at my question!

I have lots of files in my folder, they are mostly .rar and .zip files; they are about 50 mb to 100 mbs each. I have around 30,000+ files inside folders, they are within subfolders within subfolders within hundreds of sub folders. They are stored on a separate internal hard drive.

These are very important files to me,but will my computer "delete" any of these files due to the immense numbers? I'm a computer novice so I'm a little confused as to how these things function. Sometimes I go looking for files and i find them missing, but i'm not sure if i deleted them manually or if my computer accidentally deletes them because it gets "overloaded" with too many files?
 

Basic info here:

http://ask-leo.com/is_there_a_limit_to_what_a_single_folder_or_directory_can_hold.html

The limiting factor for the number of files and or folders depends on the size of your hdd. 

Please download and install Speccy to provide us with information about your computer.  This will show the size of your ssd/hdd and how much free space you have.  Clicking on this link will automatically initiate the download.

The one piece of information the Speccy will not provide is the make and model of your PSU.  If you know what it is please post this along with the Speccy link which will be generated.

When Speccy opens you will see a screen similar to the one below.


 
Click on File which is outlined in red in the screen above, and then click on Publish Snapshot.
 
The following screen will appear, click on Yes.
 

 
The following screen will appear, click on Copy to Clipboard.
 

 
In your next post right click inside the Reply to Topic box, then click on Paste.  This will load a link to the Speccy log.

Basic info here:

 

http://ask-leo.com/is_there_a_limit_to_what_a_single_folder_or_directory_can_hold.html

Thank you for sending me this article! Unfortunately I don't understand a lot of the lingo...like when it tries to explain the difference between NTFS and Fat32...what i gleaned was that there is no limit on how large the files are...but there may be limits to how many files there can be. I hope I am correct?

If this is true, then what happens when the number of files are "capped"?

Edited by Coffee_Girl, 04 February 2017 - 02:48 PM.

The limiting factor for the number of files and or folders depends on the size of your hdd. 

 

Please download and install Speccy to provide us with information about your computer.  This will show the size of your ssd/hdd and how much free space you have.  Clicking on this link will automatically initiate the download.

The one piece of information the Speccy will not provide is the make and model of your PSU.  If you know what it is please post this along with the Speccy link which will be generated.

When Speccy opens you will see a screen similar to the one below.


 
Click on File which is outlined in red in the screen above, and then click on Publish Snapshot.
 
The following screen will appear, click on Yes.
 

 
The following screen will appear, click on Copy to Clipboard.
 

 
In your next post right click inside the Reply to Topic box, then click on Paste.  This will load a link to the Speccy log.

Hi there! Thank you for your help....

Here is the link:

http://speccy.piriform.com/results/aKAiJz0rSYvbcNr5eULKOSx

FAT32 and NTFS are the two types of formats which Windows uses.  The FAT32 format has a max file size of 4GB, a NTFS format has a max file size of over 4TB, a huge difference.  Microsoft has not used a FAT32 format in several generations of Windows.  There are other benefits in using the NTFS format, but that's really not important for what you are doing.

I don't know what of my post you read, but the jist of it is the fact is that the file size and the folder size don't determine how large these can be.  The size of the hdd (hard disk drive) or ssd (solid state drive) determines the size of these.  When you hdd/sdd is full then you have reach the limit of the file size.

Looking at the Speccy I see that your C: drive only has 7% (19.6GB) of free space left, this is too full for adequate swap space.  One of the uses of swap space in is for virtual memory.  When you use applications that use a large amount of your resources, RAM, you could run out of adequate RAM.  This is where the virtual memory comes into play, it takes up a small part of the load.  You have 8GB of RAM, so unless you are using application for something like video editing you should never have a problem with RAM.

I would suggest transferring some of your data to one or both of your other drives.  Both of the other drives have a lot of free space.  A rule of thumb which had been reasonable was to maintain about 15% free space on the C: drive.  I would be comfortable seeing 10% free space with your C: drive, that would give you 29.8GB of free space.

I hope this helps.

I will second the recommendation of dc3 that you transfer as many of your files that fall into the "infrequently used" category off of your main drive and on to either another internal drive or to an external backup drive.  I always try to have two copies of a given file so that no matter which storage unit might die, I've still got another copy that I can then either back up again or can recover.

It appears that you have three drives, two that are approximately 300 MB and one that's 1 TB.  You could, in theory, copy both of your 300 MB drives over to that 1 TB drive and still have more room left than an entire one of those drives.

It really makes no sense to keep very infrequently used files on your main drive.  Since I can't have any way of knowing what you would consider "infrequently used" there's no way I can recommend how, specifically, you might choose what to copy.  There is a recent thread on the Windows 10 Support Forum entitled, Separating file types into identical folder structure, that might be helpful to you in moving or copying massive numbers of files at one time and maintaining the folder structure you're used to on the destination drive where the copy/move to is being done.  In your case you may or may not care about doing this for specific file types, but the ROBOCOPY command can be used to move/copy everything and has tons of additional options to specify what it is that you actually want to move/copy.

Windows will never automatically delete existing files that are user files.  Were you to fill up a drive you'd get an error message when the next file you're trying to create exceeds the capacity of the drive on to which you're trying to save it.

Edited by britechguy, 05 February 2017 - 12:26 PM.

The only issue I've seen has to do with the naming of the files.  If you take advantage of naming your files with long file names this can cause an issue that the file name is too long if you want to copy it to another drive.  When I see this the file names are something like "The life and times of the red handed monkey based upon the ability to drive a car 10-15-16.doc" and the directories are similarly named.

Your partitions are NTFS formatted. The limits on the quantity of files are not a concern on home user neither is the size of them except for the HDD space limit of its own storage space.

The limits that ARE a concern are file names length. For NTFS is 255. The other limitation is the maximum path name (meaning the lenght of the string to the complete absolute path of a file or even a subfolder) which is determined by a variable (MAX_PATH, I gues it is a global variable) and its size is 260 characters. You can change that value ONLY in recent versions of Windows 10.

When exceeding that value you will have rude problems as not accessing the file, not being able to move the file, or other behaviour. You must shortened the PATH to files to stick to 260 characters or you may encounter problems. Start doing it now, not when you need to move the files.

The only problem you will face with having lots of files inside a folder is when those files are images or videos and the file explorer (a GUI one) wants to show you previews of them, you may have tearing and temporarily freeze until the previews are finally loaded.