AngeliHaas Posted February 22, 2013 Share Posted February 22, 2013 Search for empty folders and delete it. If the deletion makes a folder empty delete it also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Keatah Posted February 23, 2013 Share Posted February 23, 2013 This breaks some apps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted February 23, 2013 Moderators Share Posted February 23, 2013 not a bad idea but it probably goes against the default CC settings of a softly, softly approach. Keatah is right, the potential to break something would be there, not that I've seen any yet (do you have some examples Keatah). I know whenever I've seen an empty folder, I'll delete it. If the app is written well enough, it'll recreate the folder. It it's poorly written, you get an error message and you can manually recreate. Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Alan_B Posted February 23, 2013 Share Posted February 23, 2013 Exactly how many bytes will be released for reuse when an empty folder is deleted ? I guess none at all. On the other hand Windows may use bytes as it records everything that you do from start-up to shut-down, including the removal of an empty folder that never did no harm to anyone Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Keatah Posted February 23, 2013 Share Posted February 23, 2013 Alan_B: That is correct, but for the following reason. NTFS stores folder names, in fact everything, as a file. NTFS stores $MFT entries in a b-tree structure. Each entry consumes 1024 bytes of space at the minimum. Each folder name is like a zero-byte file. It consumes a small amount of space. Record keeping, attributes, alternate data streams, cluster lists, security permissions. And more. Typically a 5 year old install has about 300,000 end-points on the b-tree. Deleting an entry (or group of empty directories) does not shrink the b-tree or free up free disk space. Deleting an empty folder is like snipping a leaf off the tree. The branches remain! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators Andavari Posted February 24, 2013 Moderators Share Posted February 24, 2013 This breaks some apps. It does! It has been a feature request before numerous times over the years. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Keatah Posted February 24, 2013 Share Posted February 24, 2013 @MTA: I don't recall any specific examples offhand. But on a whole, the situation is improving. Programs are getting better at re-creating empty/missing folders as needed. But if the program goes ahead rebuilds them I just leave them. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted February 24, 2013 Moderators Share Posted February 24, 2013 i just like doing it cause I'm anal like that. If it's empty, I kill it, why leave it there, it just makes eye-balling your drive more time consuming. and like Keatah, if it gets recreated I will live it be. @Alan_B, you're right, I don't do it for space recovery, purely for a clean folder tree. with me doing it, I have no-one else to blame if it causes sife-effects, it wouldn't be something I'd like CC to do unless it could be turned off. Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AngeliHaas Posted February 24, 2013 Author Share Posted February 24, 2013 Maybe it is a way to save the name and location of a deleted folder to have a way to recover it like the recovery function in CCleaner with registry entries. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Keatah Posted February 25, 2013 Share Posted February 25, 2013 Maybe it is a way to save the name and location of a deleted folder to have a way to recover it like the recovery function in CCleaner with registry entries. Possible, sure. But the record keeping and entries CCleaner needs to store to manage that feature, plus the added code, would far outweigh any space savings. Each unused folder takes 1-2Kbytes. This is insignificant. Even if you have 200,000 empty folders. Still insignificant. One must be careful that the cleaning program doesn't bloat itself to the point where it's better to run without it. Look at winapp2.ini. That is HUGE! I personally use about 50 entries from it. The rest is excess. But then again, I surmise that most of us here are borderline (if not full blown) OCD when it comes to system cleanliness and cyber-housekeeping. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Moderators mta Posted February 25, 2013 Moderators Share Posted February 25, 2013 i prefer the acronym CDO (i'm so OCD I have to have it in alphabetic order) Backup now & backup often.It's your digital life - protect it with a backup.Three things are certain; Birth, Death and loss of data. You control the last. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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