Temporary files eating up diskspace

[pbb]

Hi,

When trying to do a compare of a local and an FTP folder tree, BC is filling up my local system drive with temporary files. At some point it simply starts skipping files because there is not enough disk space available anymore.

The temporary files are stored in C:\Users\<Username>\AppData\Local\Temp\BC3FD1D.tmp . The folder contains thousands of files, a few gigabytes all together. I deleted all of BC's temporary files before starting the current compare, so they have all been created for this one compare.

The compare I am performing is a rules-based contents comparison, using a picture compare. (I am trying to find which photos become corrupted in an old upload, while some of the local photos have had metadata changed, so I cannot use a binary or CRC comparison.)

I can understand that each file from the FTP server has to be downloaded before it can be compared, but there is no need to keep those temporary files after the comparison has been performed? So I don't understand why the temporary folder contains more than a few files.

[Aaron]

Hello,

The expected behavior is to download the .temp file for the comparison, then delete it immediately after it is used. This can result in multiple .tmp files as multiple threads scan multiple files in a single comparison, but they should be deleted once the results are returned.

Which version of BC3 are you currently using? Is it BC3.3.9 (latest minor release)?

If you restart BC3, are the .temp files still present?

[pbb]

I just updated from 3.3.8 to 3.3.9 and did another test.

The temporary files are still there after the comparison is finished, they are only deleted when I close BC.

This makes it impossible for me to run large comparison operations, since I need free space on my system drive for all the files from the FTP server that I want to compare.

BC should delete each individual file as soon as it has been compared. Alternatively, I would like to know if there is a way to assign another folder (on another drive) for the temporary files.

[Aaron]

Hello,

The intended behavior is to do as you describe: we delete the .tmp files immediately after they are used. If for some reason this fails, we also attempt to delete them on close (and again, on launch). Most commonly, this is caused by an anti-virus locking the files as we attempt to delete them, which prevents us from clearing them out.

Do you have an anti-virus that you can temporarily disable for testing to see if that is the cause?

BC uses the current %TEMP% Windows variable for it's temporary directory. If you set this to another location, then BC3 would use it instead (along with any other Windows applications).