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I downloaded "WinDirStat" in order to clean up some space on my Windows 10 PC. This program orders directories in a tree view based on size.

Immediately I saw my user folder was using almost 30GB. Digging into the following path MyUser/AppData/Local/Microsoft/Windows/ I found the WebCache folder, which on its own contains almost 20GB of files.

Interestingly if I go to this path myself in the file browser, I cannot see the WebCache folder (and I should have hidden items as visible). I can open it (takes some time) in WinDirStat, and it just seems to be full of 512KB .log files.

Can somebody please explain what this folder is used for, why it's hidden, and if it is possible/safe to be cleared out?

dahui
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  • [It's generated by Wininet, there is a scheduled task, the files can be deleted. Feel free to wipe the data as it's only a cache folder. In order to do that manually, you must change the permissions on the files, and delete all the files not currently in use.](https://www.tenforums.com/general-support/37841-disable-webcachev01-dat.html). I believe Disk Cleanup can also be used. **You can view the contents in File Explorer by the way.** – Ramhound Nov 07 '20 at 20:32
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    Disk clean up/Clean Up System Files didn't seem to register these, and only cleaned a few hundred MB. I've just typed in the folder URI and can access the folder this way, even if it didn't show up in my file explorer (for whatever reason). I'm just manually deleting them all now – dahui Nov 07 '20 at 20:43
  • If you have hidden and system files unhidden in folder options. – Moab Nov 08 '20 at 13:23
  • Yeah I was able to manually get into the folder. Then after deleting 15GB+ of .log files, the folder was magically visible in the explorer. Bit of a weird one, but fixed now! – dahui Nov 08 '20 at 22:43

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You can find the webcache folder by going into file explorer options, view tab and uncheck "hide protected operating system files" which is different than unchecking the hidden folders option. There you will find webcache files. I'm unclear if you should delete them but from what I've read, they're like many cache files which happen to make things load faster. The path is drive/users/ username/application data/roaming/microsoft/windows/webcache

user1694605
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