[Ang_MTinSC]

Hello,
You guys are great first off, I have learned SO MUCH from reading and browsing this forum!

My quesiton is this... what exactly is the support.com folder with subfolder backup and literally 100s of folders and more files each named by letters or numbers? The support.com folder is in with program files.

I have found conflicting answers to my question and a few that suggested to delete the files in the backup folder, but that is a huge folder (which takes NAV near an hour to scan just that folder) and I am not really big on ditching it w/o knowing more info.

I am running XP SP2 and really don't have any problems with it. I run NAV and internet security, Firefox for browser and run SpyBot every few days. Just this huge folder with hundreds of files is driving insane not knowing what is in there.

Oh, some of the folders such as Be...will have files in there that say Bellsouth (which I use) with a bunch of numbers or the Mu folder has MUSC (a hospital) with numbers and looks like names of sites I have been to.

Thanks for any information or insight anyone can offer on this topic.

Ang

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Can you open the folder, right click any icon, click properties and post what it says

[Retired Tech]

Can you open the folder, right click any icon, click properties and post what it says

[Ang_MTinSC]

Sure -

I chose folder named "_2" in the long list of folders in the backup folder.
This is the path:
C:\Program Files\Support.com\backup\_2

This is a file inside that _2 folder:
Type: File
Description: 14278_5adc89a14_
Size: 2.48 kb
Size on disk: 4.0 kb
Created: February 26, 2005

Like I said in the original post, a few of these folders (that range from folders named _1 to zi ) inside the backup folder have names of webpages that I have visited and from the 100s that I have randomly looked through, most of them are number/letter combos like above description and the few that are named are places I have been, nothing unfamiliar.

For additional information if it helps, in looking at the properties of this backup folder:
Size:3.65 Gb
Size on disc: 3.70Gb
Total files: 24,621
Total folders:21,557
Attributes: Read only

I did find in my investigation over the last few weeks that old outlook pst files are located in one of these backup files names O or Ou or Osomething. Which really makes no differenct to me- I switched to Thunderbird long ago and have all my contacts, important emails backed up anyway.

Again, my computer is running just fine. This is just bugging the heck out of me...especially if it really is taking up 3.7G of space and I could dicth them....or even some of them, lol.

Thanks so much for your time!
Ang

[Retired Tech]

Can you click the folder then click move, move it to my documents, reboot the PC

If the PC reboots and runs OK then leave the folder there for a few days then send it to the recycle bin, also leave it there for a few days / reboots

Delete the folder if the PC continues to run well

[Ang_MTinSC]

Yes, I can try that. My DH and I have talked about sticking it in the recycle bin and seeing what happens, but with a folder that big, I was kind of leery, lol. I will put it in my documents first as you have suggested and see what happens. I may have to increase the size of my recycle bin to hold it later, lol.


Thanks Keith for the suggestion and help! I will report back what happens.
Ang

[Retired Tech]

That will probably display a message about deleting direct because of the size

[Ang_MTinSC]

Keith,
So far, so good, lol. I did take a while to move the file and then took a really long time to shutdown, but restarted just fine after that. When I moved it, the badckup folder stayed in place, but it is empty now. I have tried opening all the programs I need for work as well as Firefox, Mozilla, NIS, yahoo, bookmarks, etc. and it seems everything is working just fine.

Thanks...will be glad after a few days when I can get rid of all that for good and can hopefully run NAV scans without taking near 3 hours each time.


Thanks!
Ang

[Retired Tech]

Leaving it on the PC for a while is the safeguard

You could always burn it to CDR

Thank You for the update

[warntjes]

I had the same thing and found that it was the backup to Netscape 4.xx series. All of the topices under Support.com/backup were from Netscape Internet; either websites or email backups.

Any other ideas let me know.

I followed the reasoning and relocated "backup" and the virus check with McAfee went from 18 hourse to 1.5 hours.

Thanks again for your help.

warntjes

[Ang_MTinSC]

Hey there, Ang here again.

Keith, that did work, thanks! But it has returned, lol. Moved for a few days then deleted the contents of the program files\support.com\backup folder, then did normal spybot S&D, disc cleanup and defrag. Wow! Took the NAV scan time to about an hour, better than 3+, lol! After doing more research....I do think that may contain some sort of indexing or list of web sites visited and/or bookmarks (though I routinely clear my cache and cookies Firefox) but I have Bellsouth DSL and one of the update/checking programs (I think) is TGCMD. Could that be building up these files/folders? I've read some not nice things about this file that is used by Comcast and others, so not certain. Any ideas?

FYI...after deleting the folder contents (which was around 4G of drive space) the folder stayed empty for about three days....then all of a sudden it was filling again, though only about to 1.4G. So I put the files in the recycle bin, waited a few days, then deleted them again. A few days later, it was back again and I have noticed that it takes my Bellsouth help center/manager several minutes to load the first few days after I do that (which makes me think the above) and both times after deleting the Support.com\backup folders and files and they start to rebuild I notice it contains files with names of web pages that I have not visited in in a really long time...a few of them more than a year--strange! And yes, I am the only one on this computer---kids and hubby know "Hands off!" momma's work computer, lol.

Just thought I'd give you an update and see if you had any further suggestions.
Thanks for your time and hope you had a great holiday!

[aca65]

Hi, this folder is a real pain. It took 16Gigs of disk space. Tried to compress it and it only went down to 13G. Any developments? does anybody knows where did it come from? in my case it shows that it was created Jan/14 and my only new software addition was MS spyware beta release... it is my only suspect.