# Is there any danger to deleting empty folders from my hard drive?



## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Running Win 7 (yeah, I know) and I noticed some empty folders. So I started looking and found a bunch of empty folders.

I downloaded some freeware that finds ALL empty folders on a drive and ran it. This: Link

It found over 3,000 empty folders. A few are protected.

90% of them are Microsoft folders (of course).

Is there any reason I should not delete the unprotected empty folders?

I don't really need to gain more hard drive space. I have plenty of empty disc space.

But I wonder if it would speed up the system and opening stuff like Explorer.


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## HermitJohn (May 10, 2002)

NRA_guy said:


> Running Win 7 (yeah, I know) and I noticed some empty folders. So I started looking and found a bunch of empty folders.
> 
> I downloaded some freeware that finds ALL empty folders on a drive and ran it. This: Link
> 
> ...


Empty or hidden? No harm in deleting empty folders, though if official M$ empty system folders, it will probably just recreate them. Now there have been cases where I had to create empty folders or files just cause a program expected to see them and if it didnt would get upset. It didnt actually use them, just needed them to be there. You could also try renaming some of them, just add X at end. See what happens. If it recreates them in addition to the ones you changed name, you will know (probably on reboot). If it gets upset they are missing, just rename them back to original without the X. Empty files or folders dont really take any space, just make confusing clutter.

Oh to rename, you just right click on the file or folder and it will give option to rename.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

I don't know if it's safe to delete them, since you weren't clear on how to find them. But as for speeding up your system, I don't know why a bunch of empty folders would hurt performance.

When you say "hard drive space" are you saying that you are using a hard drive for drive c: and not an SSD? If that's the case you should be using an SSD. An SSD works on the order of 10x faster than a hard drive. You'll get a huge performance boost by going to an SSD.


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## Nevada (Sep 9, 2004)

HermitJohn said:


> Empty files or folders dont really take any space, just make confusing clutter.


I don't know how many people have told me that they uninstalled applications because their system is low. I had one guy who would uninstall applications in the hope of improving performance, then come to me to reinstall the same applications. Then a few weeks later he would uninstall the same applications again. When I asked why he did that again he replied that he didn't know what else to do. 

The only thing that would make a hard drive impact performance is fragmented files. The idea is that files are sometimes written to small areas of free space. That might cause a file to be written to dozens of small spaces. We call that a fragmented file. It takes a lot longer for the hard drive to read a file when it's written to dozens of locations. But Windows manages files differently today so that doesn't happen. It will never happen with a SSD drive because SSD's have firmware that manages how files are stored.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

Thanks guys.

Yes, I am talking about "empty"---not "hidden" folders/directories.

Yes, it's my C: drive and not a SSD.

I'm not talking about uninstalling any software (though I do that occasionally when some freeware has proven to be useless).

I used to defrag my C: drive about once a year, but haven't done it for several years. I read somewhere that it's not a very important thing to do.



> you weren't clear on how to find them.


As I mentioned, I used freeware named "Remove Empty Directories" from: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rem-empty-dir/ It worked great at finding and listing them. 

Scrolling down the list, I can click on each one to see its name, where it is located, and to verify that it's really empty. And I can decide if I don't want it to delete particular folders.


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## backwoodsman7 (Mar 22, 2007)

NRA_guy said:


> Is there any reason I should not delete the unprotected empty folders?
> [...]
> But I wonder if it would speed up the system and opening stuff like Explorer.


The question is, is there any reason you should delete them? Probably not. They will marginally slow down any file searches that go where there are a lot of them, but you probably never do that. And otherwise, they don't really hurt anything. They take up a very minimal amount of space, not enough to worry about even if you're tight on drive space. It's probably safe to delete them, but you won't know for sure until you do it, and then you might find yourself having to go to a lot of trouble to fix things. So, usually better to leave them alone.



NRA_guy said:


> Yes, it's my C: drive and not a SSD.


As long as the drive is working fine, there's no pressing reason to change it to an SSD. It would speed up anything drive-related, which is most of the time you're waiting for the computer, but the cost may not be worth it to you just for that.



> I used to defrag my C: drive about once a year, but haven't done it for several years. I read somewhere that it's not a very important thing to do.


It's important enough that Windows (since Vista, if memory serves) does it automatically once a week, unless you've changed the schedule. So, other than maybe checking to make sure that schedule is still set, you don't need to worry about it.


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## NRA_guy (Jun 9, 2015)

*@backwoodsman7 That's pretty well how I see it.

I would clone my hard drive before deleting them just in case . . .*


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## muleskinner2 (Oct 7, 2007)

First world problems.


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