Any help with this would be gratefully appreciated.
I've been running CCleaner (the latest version) every day or so with all cache boxes checked, I've managed to empty every internet cache that I'm aware of, but one group of several thousand JPEG images seems to be particularly elusive. All of them are images from different sites I have viewed with Google Chrome a few weeks ago. None of them are much newer than that and none of them are much older.
Every so often (seemingly at random) I'll uncover these images successfully with Recuva and overwrite them but I know from using several other recovery programs that all images still exist on my hard-drive and they keep coming back after being overwritten. The fact that I usually don't find them in the free space of my hard-drive (with Recuva) tells me that they probably exist somewhere on the in-use portion of my hard drive in some hidden cache folder. I have searched Windows explorer with show hidden files/folders checked (I have Windows Vista.) I have found most of the non-deleted images on my computer but I still could not locate any one of the thousands of internet files I am talking about and even going through the Chrome Cache myself with a cache-viewer, I could not find them and they were still on my hard-drive even after I uninstalled chrome.
One question I have is: Does anyone know of other programs that might store thumbnails viewed through Chrome? Is that a common function of other programs? I can only fathom that my computer really likes these images for whatever reason... I've looked through a few of the folders in programs I was running at the time of viewing these images and still nothing turns up.
I don't use Google Sync or iExplorer but I did find a webdata folder in Google Earth. I deleted all of the contents and afterwords found about a thousand of the images in question with Recuva. I can't say for sure if they came from that folder because they have turned up with Recuva before at random times. They always end up back on my hard-drive after being overwritten. Albeit this time (after deleting the Google Earth folder) the ones that were in the Google Earth folder have swapped their location on my hard-drive (according to Diskdigger.)
I am wondering if these files have something to do with a program I recently uninstalled. About a week or so ago I uninstalled a bunch of programs using CCleaner and I wonder if these files are remnants of an uninstalled program's cache.
okay.. Apparently I didn't have the latest version. I updated CCleaner and there was something close to 6 Gigabytes of these files found. I haven't finished scanning my Hard Drive yet, but I'm pretty sure all of this unnecessary clutter is gone now that I have cleared this cache.