My laptop is starved for space and at times something goes crazy and eats it all. Today I was down to 3 MB (yes, meg) on C at one point. I keep no working files on C, they are all on D. I can't adjust the partitioning and I intend to replace the machine soon, but as you probably know when you get down to that little space, you can't use the machine. I was busy saving things and closing things and dismissing "you are very low on disk space" dialogs and passing Skype some smelling salts because it decided the smart thing to do was sign me out due to a disk i/o problem (wat?) and then weirdly 4 gig came back (I was running Disk Cleanup, but not expecting that), which was a relief, but now I'm down to 2.5 gig already.
So, sorry for all that background but it's to give context to this question. Under AppData\Local\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Recovery there is 1.5 gig consumed whose purpose in life seems to be to allow me to reopen closed tabs. Every single tab that is open right now, or that I might ever want to reopen, is a favourite or I saved the URL to a text file or I have a link in a folder or whatever. So, can I just delete this whole folder? Or some subfolders under it, or their contents? I need my 1.5 gig back and I need to limp through the next few weeks until I replace the machine.
Best Answer
Typically - what you should see within this folder are 2 folders (active and lastactive). Within here, you will see dozens of files which have a .dat extension. These files are what internet explorer uses to store data in order to be able to "restore previous windows and tabs" in the event that internet explorer crashes - or when you have the browser configured to load your last browsing session on opening.
Deleting these folders will remove that functionality - so while you can delete them, there is an associated risk.
If you go into these folders and delete the .dat files, this will only harm you ability to restore the current session and you they should be auto-recreated (giving you a fresh start) when you launch another new session.
Hope this helps.