How should I maintain my Documents and Settings folder?

Well, I hate to tell you this, but most folks will tell you that there
really isn’t such a thing as “maintaining” the Documents and Settings folder.
It’s just a place where programs put stuff. Like documents. And settings.

Let’s explain that a little, and then also take a look at exactly what I
would do in your situation.

If you look at the top level within “Documents and Settings” you’ll find
several sub folders: “Administrator”, “All Users”, and then one each for every
user account on your system. In fact, if you include hidden folders when you
look you may find a few more “Users” you didn’t know you had that are set up
for system services.

Within each of those are a number of folders, most commonly:

• Desktop – the folder containing the shortcuts that appear, combined with the
  “All Users” equivalent folder, on your desktop.

• Favorites – the folder containing the shortcuts that appear, combined with
  the “All Users” equivalent folder, as your Favorites.

• My Documents – the default folder most programs use to place your
  documents.

• Start Menu – the folder containing the shortcuts that appear, combined with
  the “All Users” equivalent folder, as your Start Menu.

And many more. And once again, if you include hidden folders, you’ll find
even more, including something called “Application Data”, which is where
applications are supposed to store their data.

Each user of your computer is given their own folder in Documents and
Settings so that they can each maintain their own items and preferences
independent of other users on the system.

Now, this all gets much further confused by the fact that not all programs
play nice. Some use Documents and Settings, some do not. Some use the
“Application Data” folder, some use “Local Settings \ Application Data”, and
others don’t use the folder at all. Some create their own sub folders in
various places underneath Documents and Settings, some do not. Some folders are
hidden, others are not.

You get the idea. It’s messy.

There are a few specific items that are typically stored in your
Documents and Settings folder that I want to point out, since they may be
relevant to your situation:

• Internet Temporary Files – also known as your browser cache. This can take
  up a lot of space. You can clear this by clearing your browser cache.

• Windows Temporary files – these are temporary files created by other
  programs running under Windows. There’s actually no automated cleanup here, and
  these files can accumulate over time.

• Your email – Outlook Express, Outlook, and probably most other email
  programs default to placing their email storage within your Documents and
  Settings folder.

That’s really only the tip of the iceberg, though. I looked at my own
machine and it seems like all sorts of different applications create data
files, caches and more, using the space for whatever purposes make sense to
keep specific to each user for the specific application. On my machine, for
example, the top 3 biggest users were a cache for the virtual environment
Second Life, some kind of data store for Microsoft Help, and a couple of data
stores for the Google Earth application.

So knowing that there’s really little rhyme or reason behind what gets
stored in Documents and Settings makes it hard to come up with a set of
instructions on how to “maintain” it – that really varies tremendously based on
what programs you happen to have installed and how you use them.

But you can at least get a sense of who’s using up all that space. And if
you keep track, you can see who’s using more and more over time.

As mentioned in a previous article Where’s my disk space going?, the free
version of tool Space Monger will
show you graphically exactly what’s using up the space on your hard drive.
(Another option, using the Windows command line and another free tool is
described in How can I tell what’s
taking up so much disk space?).

So the one management tip I have is simply this: use some kind of tool to
see exactly what’s taking up so much space in your Documents and Settings
folder. Based on what you find you may decide that’s entirely appropriate for
your machine, and take no action. On the other hand, you might determine that a couple
of programs are using most of the space, and you might look into reconfiguring
them to use disk space more wisely, or perhaps even uninstall a program that
you no longer need.

Periodically repeat that process, so that you get a sense of how fast
some programs keep using up disk space. Once again, you might decide you want
to change something about your system depending on what you discover.