Cleanup 4.5.2 - beware

[Li'l Abner]

Someone recommended this utility by Stephen Gould to me quite some time
back and I have used it faithfully. It is much like CCleaner except it will
clean all user accounts at once.
But it turned into what could have been a disaster on one of my own
computers. I have several drives and partitions. One of my drives is a 2
terabyte drive that I use partially to download TV programs on. I created a
/temp folder 0on the drive and my TV software automatically downloads
several preset programs including the nightly news and some of my other
favorite programs to that folder. Every morning at 3 AM everything I have
downloaded to that folder is automatically backed up to a second backup
computer.
Every once in a while I sort the temp files out into subfolders like
"news", "America's Got Talent", etc. and some I just delete.
Long story short. I ran Cleanuip 4.5.2. on this computer yesterday and it
totally wiped out about 250 Gigabytes of saved up TV shows. It took out
everything in my self created temp folder including all the subfolders. All
I lost was last night's 10 o'clock news since all the rest of it had been
backed up to the second computer.
Moral of the story: Don't create temporary folders and name them "temp" if
you are going to use Cleanup. Of course all the Windows created temp
folders are fair game because the files in *those* folders are indeed
disposable unless you're installing something that requires a reboot. But
in a case sucj as that you wouldn't be running the cleanup utility anyway.

--
--- A dyslexic man walks into a bra ---

[Dustin]

"Li'l Abner" <blvstk@dogpatch.com> wrote in
news:Xns9F995C168504Ebutter@wefb973cbe498:

> Someone recommended this utility by Stephen Gould to me quite some time
> back and I have used it faithfully. It is much like CCleaner except it
> will clean all user accounts at once.

Which is a major help. I've used this application for several years now.

> But it turned into what could have been a disaster on one of my own
> computers. I have several drives and partitions. One of my drives is a 2
> terabyte drive that I use partially to download TV programs on. I
> created a /temp folder 0on the drive and my TV software automatically
> downloads several preset programs including the nightly news and some of
> my other favorite programs to that folder. Every morning at 3 AM
> everything I have downloaded to that folder is automatically backed up
> to a second backup computer.

You're describing a very bad practice with regard to naming folders. With
that configuration, you're asking for trouble. I wonder what other
interesting problems you may have caused for yourself...

As I recall you having a terrible issue with a driver system I recommended
sometime back. The only issues I've ever had with it are it's occasionally
misidentifying hardware and causing a bluescreen when it loads the wrong
driver. If I'm paying attention tho, I can uncheck the misdiagnosed ones
and it won't try to load the driver I know is bad. So when it screws up, I
blame it rightfully on myself. lol.

> Every once in a while I sort the temp files out into subfolders like
> "news", "America's Got Talent", etc. and some I just delete.
> Long story short. I ran Cleanuip 4.5.2. on this computer yesterday and
> it totally wiped out about 250 Gigabytes of saved up TV shows. It took
> out everything in my self created temp folder including all the
> subfolders. All I lost was last night's 10 o'clock news since all the
> rest of it had been backed up to the second computer.

Yes, it did. This was entirely user error. You could have specified to
leave that folder alone. *You* named it a "temp" folder, and surprise
surprise, it was mistaken for one.

> Moral of the story: Don't create temporary folders and name them "temp"
> if you are going to use Cleanup. Of course all the Windows created temp
> folders are fair game because the files in *those* folders are indeed
> disposable unless you're installing something that requires a reboot.
> But in a case sucj as that you wouldn't be running the cleanup utility
> anyway.

Ehh, no. Moral of the story; don't put things you want to keep in a folder
called "temp". It's really not cleanups fault here. It's yours. sorry, but,
it really is your fault.




--
Character is doing the right thing when nobody's looking. There are too
many people who think that the only thing that's right is to get by, and
the only thing that's wrong is to get caught. - J.C. Watts