TIF folders

[Rob K]

In scanning my drives, I noticed that I had several folders with various
name designations of combined numbers and letters. When I looked into the
contents of these folders, they were various cookies and files similar to
what is in my TIF folder. What is this ?

Also, my TIF folder location changed when I installed 5.01. Now there are
2, in addition to whatever the above is. Help.

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Rob

This is probably more than you want to know. <g>

What you are seeing with the Temporary Internet Files (TIF) is by design.

The TIF, Cookies and History folder contain an index.dat file which is an index of all
the files contained in those folders. If you delete a file in these folders, this does
not remove the entry for the deleted file from the index.dat this is why these folders
need to be completely deleted, using DOS, occasionally to keep the size of the
index.dat small.

The TIF folder is a System Folder and is designed to store every file from every web
page that is visited. This makes browsing much faster when you re-visit those web
pages since the browser can simply get the files needed to display those pages from
the TIF instead of re-downloading everything.

To make this process even faster, the TIF contains at least 4 sub-folders which it
appears contains duplicates of all the files in the TIF. This is an illusion. The
files in the sub-folders are simply "virtual pointers" to the actual files which are
only present in the TIF folder. The number of sub-folders will increase as the size of
the TIF increases. All of the Cookie files are also duplicated in these folders but
they only exist in the C:\Windows\Cookies folder.

These "virtual pointers" will behave exactly like the actual files that they "point"
to in the TIF folder.
They will even show the size and properties of the actual file. This is why it looks
like they are taking up as much space as the actual TIF folder, but once again, this
is an illusion. The only way that you can see the actual size of these sub-folders is
to view them in DOS, without Windows running. When you view these folders in DOS it
shows that the sub-folders are completely empty.

The sub-folders are automatically given "random" names to prevent a malicious hacker
from trying to view the contents of these folders or place a malicious program in
there when you are connected to the internet. If they do not know the names of the
folders, then they cannot access them. These names are generated when you delete these
folders from DOS and then re-start Windows.

***

For the problem with the 2 different TIF locations. Open IE5 and go to Tools/Internet
Options/General Tab/Settings. Click on the "View Files" button and this will show you
where the browser is storing these files. You can delete the other folder.

--
Ronnie Vernon
Microsoft MVP-DTS

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"Rob K" <kenn...@netdoor.com> wrote in message news:Oqes5T2N$GA.190@cppssbbsa04...

[Spooky]

Wow.....does it "hurt" to have such an understanding of temporary internet
files?
My brain fried just reading that...

Amazing answer, I applaud you. Great job!
I wish all the responses in here could be so precise and specific and in
depth.
Keep up the good work.

Spooky
"I always wanted to be somebody, but I see now I should have been more
specific."