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As title, is it worth backing this up? It's twice the size of my documents folder.
IANAE, but it's where emails (for example) are stored for Thunderbird. You should be able to drill down and find the most relevant bits to back up, rather than the whole lot
HTH
All depends what is in there.
It's normally just caches....
Google Earth cache
Spotify cache
I don't bother myself, as all the caches just get rebuilt if it gets cleared out.
Depends what's in it. %appdata% is a link to c:\users\username\appdata\roaming. It's used for application data.
There are actually two others, appdata\local and appdata\locallow. Theoretically, Roaming contains data which would follow you between machines on a corporate network, and Local which doesn't (typically because it's either machine-specific, unimportant or too large to efficiently roam). Temporary internet files, for instance, reside in local. LocalLow is broadly the same as local, but requires fewer permissions to access.
Between the three, I suspect that local is where the bulk of your space is taken up. Possibly the only one you might want to back up is roaming. But like I said, it depends what's in it.
Treesize is good for analysing disk usage:
https://www.jam-software.de/customers/downloadTrial.php?article_no=80&freeware=1&language=EN
(Just download the .zip file and extract the .exe, it's all you need.)
TFC will probably make a dent in local, in deleting temp files and the like:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/download/tfc/
I've been using treesize, it's awesome.
The reason for asking was that my backups were 10Gb per week, most of which seems to be AppData. But I don't think it needs to be.
Saved 38Gb from my Windows\temp directory, and a whopping 19Gb from Windows\logs! Now I should be able to create a system image alongside my backups and not run out of space.
On my work laptop:
8.8Gb Local
614Mb Roaming
43Mb LocalLow
Of that 8.8Gb, half of it is images for the Android SDK, the bulk of the rest of it the .ost cache for Outlook and temp Internet files for IE and Chrome.
Roaming and Local are both about 5Gb. I don't have a work Windows network though with roaming profiles. Seems odd that roaming is so big.
Seems odd that roaming is so big.
Some apps just store stuff there by default regardless of whether you can roam.
Some apps just store stuff there by default regardless of whether you can roam.
Indeed. There's two points here really. The first is that you have a Roaming appdata irrespective of whether you're actually roaming, it's not a part of Roaming Profiles but rather it's separated out just in case you do. The second is that it's down to app manufacturers to store their data according to MS guidelines, so you're at the mercy of good / bad programming practices.
Did you run TFC?
C previously nearly filled its 280Gb, now it's 80Gb! 🙂
Did you run TFC?
No.. didn't think it was worth it now.. unless you think I can save even more space?
Generally speaking, if you are a home user, no, it's all junk.
One way to find out. (-: It's worth a punt, I've used it for years and not once had an issue with it (he said, tempting fate). You don't always get massive gains but it can be a quick win on drives that are critically full.
I'm a bit of a Jedi Master at pulling free space out of thin air on older Windows OSes, I've done it many many times on Server 2003 installs that have filled their drives and then filled their pants. It's getting increasingly harder to do on modern incarnations though, more storage is required by the OS but also less of it is surplus or can otherwise be removed safely.
TFC only saved another few hundred MB after my efforts.
Cleaning up in general though has made the system much snappier on startup. Interesting.
Windirstat is a nice little (tiny) app that lets you see where space is being taken up.
I was useful when cleaning up my Mrs netbook hard drive, as the drive was so small it didn't have enough space to install and extract Ms office.
Turned out iTunes was using loads of space for itself and temp file spacey, so that went out of the window! (no pun intended)!