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I just ran WinDirStat and noticed that Google Chrome is using tons of disk space.
One file in particular is 5.9GB and hasn't been modified since July 11, 2013, its name is just: 00000001

What is this file? Why was it created? And is it safe to delete?

Chrome WTF To try to give me more insight, I checked Windows Reliability Monitor History for that date. I found that the time it was created coincides with the time I tried to mod GTA IV with ICE Enhancer and texture packs.

Here is how that went: GTAIV WTF

I suspect these two things are related. Could I delete that file? Why was it created?

Derek Ziemba
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3 Answers3

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Guess I posted too soon. Just figured it out. I had an idea to try to compress it with 7-Zip to see what the compression ratio was. I figured that if the compression ratio was extremely high, it's probably some kind of failed download that Chrome allocated space for.

Instead, I realized I could just try opening it with 7-Zip, because it seems like it can open anything, and it worked. It showed what the unknown file contained.

7-zip finds what the file is

Chrome didn't clean up a download properly. Chrome's download manager says the file "Lords Textures.rar" was Removed, but it obviously wasn't.

Community
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Derek Ziemba
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Move the file to a different folder and restart and use Chrome for a while. If you have no issues you can delete the file.

I think this is a temporary file from the download. But I don't use Chrome very often, so this is speculation.

Mogget
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magicandre1981
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It's most likely a backup or a leftover temporary file for a download. Also found huge files (~1GB) in the exact same spot with no file extension and named 00000001 and 00000002. Opened the files using VLC (free video player capable of playing pretty much any video file) and found out that the files were actually videos I downloaded ages ago, but for some reason Chrome didn't remove these temporary files after the download had finished.

TL;DR I'm pretty sure these files are safe to delete without affecting the functionality of the program. (I've been a Windows power-user for 12 years and I'm a University student of Information Processing.)

Observer
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