FAO PC Guru types - HD housekeeping

[paulo]

Curiosity as to why OS HD seems to be filling up rapidly led me to the location Users/Owner/AppData/Local/Temp which contains about 20GB of files that I'm guessing must be CW related given that the PC in question isn't used for anything else. There are 15 or so .HDMP files ranging from 1.1GB to 1.3GB in size and all are recent (last 2 weeks). I have been having some problems with a particular project crashing (now solved) so I guess this is related to that. A lot of guesswork though, right?

The questions this raises is can I delete them and why only recently - it's not like CW has never crashed on me before over the years.? If they are crash related, where did all the years worth of others go?

Further delving led to Users/Owner/My Documents/Celemony/Separations which contains about 10GB worth  of many files. Guesswork suggests that these are Melodyne clip related. Given that I only ever use Melodyne in CW via ARA and always bounce to clip when I'm finished (old habit from v-vocal days) can I also delete these as the audio I want is within the project folder, right? Or not?

TIA

Edited July 13, 2021 by paulo

[John Vere]

I think generally temp files are safe to delete, and ya, for sure the Melodyne stuff too. 

Possibly to be sure copy those folders to an external or back up drive just in case. But my guess is they won't be missed. 

[paulo]

11 minutes ago, John Vere said:

I think generally temp files are safe to delete, and ya, for sure the Melodyne stuff too. 

Possibly to be sure copy those folders to an external or back up drive just in case. But my guess is they won't be missed. 

Yeah, I figured that with the CW files the clue was that they were in a folder called "temp" so I already moved them to an external HD awaiting confirmation that it was ok to bin them completely. Funny how there are none prior to this month though as nothing has been changed on the pc.

 

[Michael Vogel]

Here’s what dr Google has to say about HDMP files. 
“A file with the HDMP file extension is a Windows Heap Dump file used for storing uncompressed error files generated, or "dumped," when a program crashes in some versions of Windows. Compressed dump filesare stored in the MDMP (Windows Minidump) format and are used by Windows to send the crash reports to Microsoft.”

 

Hope that helps. Though you probably have already looked it up yourself. 

[paulo]

On 7/14/2021 at 10:44 AM, Michael Vogel said:

Hope that helps. Though you probably have already looked it up yourself. 

Yes. I know and have confirmed due to another crash yesterday what they are and where they come from (ie cakewalk crashes) , but I still don't know why according to the dates of the files it has never happened prior to July 2021 given that nothing has been updated/changed on the PC for quite a long time, so it's like something became activated somehow that wasn't before. If so, it would be nice to know how to turn it off again, but at least I now know where to look first when the OS HD starts filling up for no apparent reason. 

[Starship Krupa]

On 7/15/2021 at 12:11 PM, paulo said:

it would be nice to know how to turn it off again

The solution I'd be looking for is how to prevent Cakewalk from crashing. Make notes of what is going on when it crashes, ask here in the forum and/or with tech support?

[paulo]

On 7/19/2021 at 5:08 AM, Starship Krupa said:

The solution I'd be looking for is how to prevent Cakewalk from crashing. Make notes of what is going on when it crashes, ask here in the forum and/or with tech support?

I know what was causing the crash. I don't understand why an existing project that had always been fine before should suddenly decide that it does not like one instance of a particular plug-in but it doesn't mind the other instance of it, but there you go, that's computers for you. One day you love them, the next you'd cheerfully lob the thing out the window, but my point was that given that there were none of these HD filling crash files pre-dating the current month it seems that something is now "on" that was "off" before. It would be nice to be able to put it back the way it was to save having to delete them.

[Starship Krupa]

I get ya, for sure, it's not like you can use those dump files to figure out what's going on so who needs them?

One thing I can say is that although who knows what's going on in your case, Windows 10 loves log files. When I first upgraded my laptop to Windows 10, I noticed that the hard drive light was on constantly. I'm told (and experience bears out) that when you first upgrade your system to Windows 10, you might as well just leave it turned on 24 hours a day until it settles down with whatever it's doing.

Being a curious sort, and familiar with diagnostic tools, I used Resource Monitor to figure out that it was writing zillions of log files, and configured it to turn as many of them off as I could find. It was logging everything. I don't even remember how I did it, but there are utilities that allow you to configure it.

Also, my policy is that if it's in my Temp folder, it's fair game. Off with its head. Into the trash and emptied. Sometimes things will complain that they're in use, in that case I leave them alone, but everything else is gone gone gone.

I'm very stingy with my hard drive space, my laptop has a 220G C drive and that's it. My favorite tool for figuring out what's eating so much space is WizTree. Gives you a graphic representation of file size on your disk, what's taking up the most space.

iZotope and IK Multimedia love to leave their downloaded installers laying around, which isn't a big deal on my main system with plenty of storage, but on the laptop, out with it.