The release notes for CCleaner v6.27 (rel. 21-Aug-2024) at https://www.ccleaner.com/ccleaner/version-history state in part that "The Windows Defender Quarantine folder has been added to clean up."
Does this apply to Health Check (which I never use), Custom Clean or both, and where is the option to enable / disable cleaning of the Windows Defender quarantine folder located?.
When I run Custom Clean it doesn't seem to make any difference if the option at Applications tab | Utilities | Windows Defender shown below is disabled (the default?) or enabled - when that option is enabled Custom Clean doesn't find any Defender files to clean on my system even though Defender is my primary antivirus.
According to the support article Applications Tab for CCleaner for Windows if you enable cleaning of Windows Defender then Custom Clean should clean "a lot of log files, most of which you are unlikely to find necessary (in most cases)" that are generated by Microsoft’s built-in Defender. I don't believe I have anything quarantined at the moment but I did expect Custom Clean to find a few log files for deletion when Applications tab | Utilities | Windows Defender is enabled.
All Disk Cleanup is doing and has only ever done to my knowledge is remove old archived virus definition files and/or something else that are archived to fall back upon and it can clean them if/when they aren't needed anymore. Disk Cleanup has never touched what's located in: C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service
I wonder if Microsoft's rival to CCleaner cleaning program can clean that location? I can't download and test it because I don't have a Microsoft account which is necessary to download it from the Windows Store.
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Similar thing happened to me then I found a post in a Microsoft forum stating to delete the files in safe mode. <em style="background-color:#1d2e42;color:#f5f7fc;font-size:14px;">"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service". </em>This worked well without any bad side effects.
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I haven't tested since I've never needed (or wanted) to manually clean my Microsoft Defender logs, but doesn't the Disk Cleanup tool built in to Win 10 (Windows Administrative Tools | Disk Cleanup | Clean Up System Files | Microsoft Defender Antivirus) accomplish the same thing without needing to boot up in Safe Mode?
As I noted in my original 21-Aug-2024 post, CCleaner's Custom Clean does not find anything to clean when I enable Windows Defender cleaning, but Win 10's built-in Disk Cleanup tool currently finds over 16 MB of "non-critical" Defender log files on my system. I'm fairly certain that Disk Cleanup would not delete quarantined files in my Defender quarantine folder, but I would never want a disk cleaning app to do that anyway.
I would have thought that the 'hidden' Windows admin account should be able to do it too - if you know how to enable it. That has elevated permissions that 'normal' admin accounts don't.
If you like it's a super-admin, (what Unix/linux users know as the "Root" account). In Windows it's hidden and you should only enable it when absolutely necessary.
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Similar thing happened to me then I found a post in a Microsoft forum stating to delete the files in safe mode. <em style="background-color:#1d2e42;color:#f5f7fc;font-size:14px;">"C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service". </em>This worked well without any bad side effects.
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Similar thing happened to me then I found a post in a Microsoft forum stating to delete the files in safe mode. "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service". This worked well without any bad side effects.
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I can confirm that we have in fact removed the cleaning of the quarantine folder in CCleaner 6.27. The cleaning had stopped working correctly and after investigating, we've determined that it's preferable to remove that cleaning rule.
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That's because Microsoft Defender Antivirus has been locked down more in recent months, third party cleaning tools can't really clean it anymore if at all which I found out using my own cleaners I had made for CCleaner in winapp2.ini - they didn't work at all anymore.
I found out after Microsoft Defender Antivirus produced a false positive in the Downloads folder and was stuck for over a week in a half-broken loop of trying to quarantine something that didn't even exist anymore on the SSD. There was no way of cleaning out the responsible folder "C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows Defender\Scans\History\Service" which nothing in Windows can mess with anymore either, not even Taking Ownership works. It actually stinks that it doesn't have a setting to turn off the lockdown to remove the false quarantining bug I discovered.
I fixed my issue outside of Windows by using Linux Mint to delete what couldn't be done using Windows versus what was being recommended over and over online of formatting and installing Windows fresh which is b.s., it literally took seconds to fix it using Linux Mint.
I can confirm that we have in fact removed the cleaning of the quarantine folder in CCleaner 6.27. The cleaning had stopped working correctly and after investigating, we've determined that it's preferable to remove that cleaning rule. Unfortunately, our release notes have this the wrong way around, so I will seek to get those corrected.
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....Whether you would actually want CCleaner to clear any quarantine folder is a debatable point, but I suppose that older stuff in one you might want to get rid of...
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2 hours ago, APMichael said:
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The release notes are wrong: the quarantine cleanup has been removed....
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Thanks to everyone for your prompt feedback. At least I know now that this "new" option isn't hidden in some odd location in the interface that I couldn't find.
And just to clarify, I don't want CCleaner cleaning anything related to my Microsoft Defender antivirus - not scan logs, not my quarantine folder (which is a terrible idea, in my opinion), or anything else.
I went looking for it but couldn't find it either.
However it wouldn't be the first time recently that they have announced something in the release notes that hasn't actually been implemented yet.
Whether you would actually want CCleaner to clear any quarantine folder is a debatable point, but I suppose that older stuff in one you might want to get rid of.
(I don't even clear the Defender logs using CCleaner, I found that if/when I did that Defender then thought it had never been run and so ran a new full scan).