How to delete a big folder permanently and quickly

Question

I noticed my hard drive filling up every time I cleared space, for no reason so I downloaded an app which helped me find out which files are taking up the most space. My hard drive is around 450 GB large and I don't know any files that take that much space on my computer (my games are on a separate SSD).

I found out that there was a crash report folder that had thousands of files in it, adding up to 417 GB. How can I delete this folder? I tried deleting it the normal way but it would just take days as it is literally too many files. Also where does this come from, is this a virus? Location of folder:

C:\Users\Myname\AppData\Local\CEF\User Data\CrashPad\reports

I'm running windows 10.

Answer 1

You can speed up deleting significantly by doing it from the command prompt.

Here's how to do it:

1. Click on an empty part in the addressbar so you can type in it.
2. Clear the entire addressbar and type in cmd and press enter.
3. A command prompt window is opened with the explorer's folder set as its starting folder.
4. Type del *.* to delete all files.

I don't know how important the folder itself is, but I found out that rd MyFolder /s is even faster, as it skips checking for any files and just removes the entry to the files itself (Should be instantly removed). You then have to recreate the folder. Do note rd removes all files and subfolders including the folder you want to remove. If you don't want to remove everything, this is not an option.

Answer 2

I find using robocopy is much faster, especially if gazillions of little files. It is also the easiest way to delete files that exceed the 256-charter limit.

The concept is to mirror an empty directory and make use of Multiple Threads ie:

1. Create an empty folder. C:\tempdir will do.
2. From CMD prompt:

Robocopy c:\tempdir d:\delete_me /r:0 /MIR /MT:16

Enhance it further by adding:

• /l to dry-run (no changes made to files)
• /MT:32 or /MT:64 if your processor will handle it.
• /nfl and /ndl to exclude folder and directory names in report
• /np to exclude progress
• /xj to exclude junction points and symbolic links (just in case!)
• /log:c:\temp.txt to output to text file instead of console

Answer 3

I'm afraid Window's copy/move routines are just slow, compounded by NTFS also being slow.
No way round that.

If you've got a nix or Mac machine you could drop the drive into temporarily [assuming NTFS write capability was enabled, it's not natively], that would be far quicker.