Hidden log files eat your disk space and you will find them on all machines.
Log files can be useful: They're usually plain-text records of actions taken by software as it runs — changes made, files added or deleted, and so on. When something goes wrong, it may be possible to examine the appropriate log file to see what the software was trying to do when it encountered trouble. That, in turn, can be a valuable troubleshooting clue.
But over the years, log files have moved from front-line troubleshooting to a rarely used and obscure tool tucked away on your PC. Log files can be like weeds, growing in the quiet corners of your hard drive.
Try this experiment in order to see just how many log files are taking up space on your hard drive:
Click Start, Search, then search All files and folders on your hard drive for any files named *.log. Odds are, you'll find hundreds of log files you probably never knew existed. (The \Windows\ folder tree alone is a rich repository of log files.) My system currently has 358 of them.
With today's large disks, a passel of small log files isn't worth worrying about. But sometimes log files can become huge, or a single active program may create a large quantity of log files.
First and foremost, log files are usually simple plain-text files. You can open them in Notepad and see what they contain. You can delete them if you're sure that neither you nor the application that created them will need the information inside. (Tip: Copy the log files to a CD or other safe place before you delete them from your hard drive. Then, if it turns out you need the information, it's still recoverable.)
You also can use various disk-cleaning utilities to delete log files automatically, if you're sure you no longer need them.
But sometimes, software will lock a log file while it's in use, making it difficult to remove by normal means. A tool like the free and excellent
MoveOnBoot can delete files that are normally locked, in-use, or otherwise unable to be deleted from inside Windows.
The above steps can take care of log files after they're created. But, of course, it's best to keep unneeded log files from being generated in the first place. Most log-creating software, lets you turn off the log file function, if you're sure you don't need it.
