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My disk cleanup seems unable to delete a lot of messages worth of "temporary files" that it sees, even after I went and deleted contents of various temporary folders I found myself. I would like to try delete such files manually, but for this I need to figure out just where are those "temporary files" that Disk Cleanup is detecting and offering to delete.

Any suggestions? What folders does Disk Cleanup examine to tally up the temporary files?

Peter Mortensen
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EndangeringSpecies
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  • Why do you want to delete temporary files manually ? Are you saying that you have so much temporary files that disk cleanup cannot cope and leaves a certain volume behind ? – Simon Dec 01 '12 at 22:07
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    In my case, I want to know because it's saying i have 5 GB of temp files and I want to know what they are before they are deleted. – Dan Pritts Dec 25 '15 at 04:54

3 Answers3

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The "Temporary Files" folder that Disk Cleanup is referring to is the one pointed to by the environment variable %TEMP%. You can go directly to this folder by typing %TEMP% in the Run box or in the address bar in Windows Explorer.

Disk Cleanup's list of "places to cleanup" is stored in the registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches. The Temporary Files item is in a key named, unsurprisingly, Temporary Files.

Patrick Seymour
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  • The TEMP and TMP environment variables point to the current user's temp file directory only. – kreemoweet Jun 28 '14 at 17:47
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    There are system environment variables for TEMP and TMP also. A program can ask for the system variables instead of the user variables. – Patrick Seymour Jun 30 '14 at 00:24
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    In my Windows 7, the system TEMP is `C:\Windows\Temp` but that also doesn't contain [408 GB](https://www.facebook.com/cees.timmerman/posts/10206062924043204?comment_id=10206069052076401&notif_t=feed_comment) of my 1 TB HDD. – Cees Timmerman Mar 28 '16 at 11:35
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I couldn't find anything other than %TEMP% in the registry key mentioned by Patrick, so I tried to log cleanmgr.exe using Process Monitor.

cleanmgr.exe does a File System Class SetDispositionInformationFile Operation with Delete: True Detail on files in %TEMP%, which in my case according to echo is equal to %LOCALAPPDATA%\Temp

It had already deleted the 3 GB unaccounted for by %TEMP% though, and didn't trim the 500+ MB C:\Windows\Logs\CBS\CBS.log; I suspect most of my wasted space was in winsxs.

Community
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Cees Timmerman
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It's very simple to remove all temporary files on Windows 7 64bit or 32-bit. Just do the below:

  1. Open (RUN), type %temp%, and then Enter.
  2. You will find that all temporary files are in that folder. Just remove what you want.

See http://www.get-answer.net/questions/how-to-remove-the-temp-files-in-windows-7-64x/.

Peter Mortensen
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Ahmed Alaa
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    Welcome to Super User! This duplicates another answer and adds no new content. Please don't post an answer unless you actually have something new to contribute. – DavidPostill Aug 07 '16 at 07:05
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    It is also an exact copy of the text in the link without the required quote format. Please read [How to reference material written by others](http://superuser.com/help/referencing). You should block quote text that has been written by some else. See [Markdown help](https://superuser.com/editing-help). – DavidPostill Aug 07 '16 at 07:06
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    The link is broken. – Peter Mortensen Mar 25 '17 at 22:01