Deleting temp files from the c drive

Question

Hello,

I noticed that our Orion's c drive was getting a little full of temp files in C:\WINDOWS so I deleted a few large ones. As it turned out, this action deleted a couple of live reports. What are these files and how are they generated and why would deleting some of them get rid of reports? The drive's getting kind of full again but I'm nervous about deleting them now.

Thanks for reading,

Tim

ecklerwr1 · Answer

Temp files are temp files.... For me Solarwinds creates a directory C:\WINDOWS\Temp\SolarWinds and in there sometimes creates temp files in a NetworkAtlas or JobEngine folder.... deleting files from temp especially if they still aren't locked or recent shouldn't cause any problems at all.  What report's seemed to disapear?  I don't think that should happen by deleting temp files.  Also if you can figure out what process is accessing one of temp files while it's open might show you what's writing out the large temp files all the time.  You can run Systernals Free Tool Process monitor and it will show you files being accessed on the server in real time if you can't figure out what's filling up the directory:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896645.aspx

timwelsh · Answer

Hi, Windows2003 and they're in C:\WINDOWS\Temp

A couple of examples are:

28A9A591.tmp  B90ED15E.tmp  AD47DA6F.tmp  On average about 1.3GB in size

ecklerwr1 · Answer

On what OS W2k3?  And these are in c:\windows ?  I checked and I don't have any of these... what kind of names do the temp files have?