NTUSER.DAT and UsrClass.dat files building up by the thousands, why and can I delete?

Posted by Anthony on Server Fault See other posts from Server Fault or by Anthony
Published on 2012-08-22T20:03:30Z Indexed on 2012/11/21 23:01 UTC
Read the original article Hit count: 3621

I've noticed that my web server, 2008 Xen VM, gradually loosing free space - more than I would of though from normal use and decided to investigate.

There are two problem areas:

*C:\Users\Administrator\ (6,755.0 MB)*

with files: 

NTUSER.DAT{randomness}.TMContainer'0000 randomness'.regtrans-ms
NTUSER.DAT{randomness}.TM.blf

AND

C:\Users\Administrator\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\ (6,743.8 MB)

with files

UsrClass.dat{randomness}.TMContainer'0000 randomness'.regtrans-ms
UsrClass.dat{randomness}.TM.blf

From what I understand these are in-time backups of registry changes. If that is the case I cannot possibly understand why there would be 10000+ changes. (That's how many files there are per folder location, over 20,000 per folder in total.)

The files are using almost 15GB of space and I want rid of them, I'm just wondering can I remove them. However, I need to understand why they are being created so I can avoid this in the future.

Any ideas why there would be so many? Is there a way I can check to see what is making the modifications?

  • Are they created with login attempts?
  • Are they created in relation to every day Web Server use?
  • etc. and so on

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