Deleting empty folders? Yes or No?

  • Thread starter Thread starter HKS racer
  • 3 comments
  • 1,810 views
HKS racer

HKS racer

(Banned)
Messages
4,802
So I found one of those little programms that automatically scan and remove empty folders from you pc, but I'm cautious. The programm (Empty Folder Scanner) by Iobit, inside Advanced System Care let me decide which folders I want to be deleted or not, problem is they are more than 1600 so I'm NOT going to select or deselect them one by one. What if I remove them all? I'm ok to remove all the useless folders but folders inside programms? What usually happen to a programm when he can't find an empty folder? Does it create one automatically?

Thanks in advance.
 
Empty folders take up very little space, I wouldn't' worry about them.

Different programs do different things. I'd leave them alone.
 
Some empty folders are needed by the system and programs.

An empty folders size is 1byte.

But due to formatting and the way information is stored on HDDs/SSDs it is what ever the sector size is 4KB is the default for NTFS formatted volumes.

Make a notepad with the letter A inside it and see for yourself.
 
An empty folder has a size of 0, not 1. The only space it takes up is space in its entry in its parent directory. In the FAT16 filesystem that was 32 bytes. I couldn't find a definitive source for its size in NTFS, but it appears to be larger; two figures I saw in a quick google were 1024 and 4096. So worst case is those 1600 files are only taking up six and a half megabytes; nowadays that's practically nothing. Additionally, even if you delete them the now-empty directory slots will still be there. so your effective gain by deleting them is zero.
 

Latest Posts

Back