Careful to Disk Cleanup on Windows 10: It may delete your Downloads folder
A small change made on Windows 10 October 2018 Update could cause quite annoying problems if you do not pay attention to this little detail.
Microsoft aims to overshadow the Disk Cleanup tool on Windows 10, and it already has an alternative. On Windows 10 October 2018 Update there is a special screen of the Settings called Storage, where we find Memory sensor (Storage sense in English), an overview of the space available on the various disks, and the voice Free space now. These three features will allow us to get rid of Disk Cleanup, but at the moment the tool remains.
However, it is surprising that in the tool, which could disappear on an upcoming version of Windows 10, there are new features, and some users have been burned. On Twitter, the developer Martin Suchan, an expert on the Windows platform, writes that in the last update ” the Documents folder was added to the Disk Cleanup tool list “.
And the developer himself warns users of the platform saying that he ” erased the entire download folder by mistake “, because he usually selected all the options to eliminate unnecessary data from his computer.
We believe it is a more than widespread practice and, according to GHacks who originally reported the news, the option to ” clean up ” the Download folder had already been added among the Memory Sensor features in previous builds of Windows 10 on the Cleaning tool disk had not been implemented yet. This up to Windows 10 October 2018 Update, where in any case, it remains unchecked until the user is interacting with it. The Download folder is the default folder where the new files are downloaded, and may contain contents of several GBytes.
Precisely for this reason the deletion of all the files present in it may not be pleasant, so we warn you: pay attention when using one of the two Windows 10 native tools. We also remind that the distribution of the last update is currently blocked because of a problem with deleting the Documents folder during installation. The 17763.17 build, containing the fix, has been released for those who have already downloaded the update, while for all the others (with the exception of the Insiders of the Lento and Release Preview channels) it will be available soon.
