I’ve been cleaning up my office computers deleting out the millions of .tmp files we have.
Our MIS guy says that everytime you ctr-alt-del or accidently turn off the computer it makes a file.
I guess there are other things. Like when you have a document and in outlook you can pull down a menu and do a send to I can physically see it creates a .tmp file.
But are these used for anything?
Like when I click into them they are usually blank. Or they come up jibberish. Can I convert them into something readable?
Applications store data temporarily as .tmp files, because they’re not using the data right then, so there’s no use in using up valuable memory, but they still need to keep it on hand. When an application is through with it, then it should delete the .tmp file.
If you cycle the power before it gets the chance, then some application might have left its .tmp file there. But it’s not like your OS says “He’s shutting the computer off - create temp files!” They’re already there as the apps are running, and should be deleted as long as the app doesn’t crash first.
Our MIS guy says that everytime you ctr-alt-del or accidently turn off the computer it makes a file.
Those files are created by ScanDisk. When ScanDisk finds an error, it usually saves the broken file before it fixes or deletes the error. Those are different from .TMP files.
*I guess there are other things. Like when you have a document and in outlook you can pull down a menu and do a send to I can physically see it creates a .tmp file.
But are these used for anything?*
.TMP files are just that, they are temperary files. Most of them are used as temperary backup files for installation programs or some applications.
Like when I click into them they are usually blank. Or they come up jibberish. Can I convert them into something readable?
I don’t know what 3/4 of the files are for in my system. All I know is that they are mysterious things that lurk in the eerie world of electronic life and if messed with tend to screw up the system something awful.
Feel free to delete .tmp files to your heart’s content. If an application is still using the file, Windows will not let you delete it.
Scandisk does not create .tmp files, it creates .chk files. This is a legacy of the old chkdsk program from MS-DOS. They are created when cross-linked or lost clusters are identified by analyzing the drive’s File Allocation Tables. These can also be safely deleted. Recovering useful data from .chk files is tedious and unlikely at best.