??, these 7 folders in Windows 10 Pro - Temp, they load all the time??

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I am continually seeing 7 folders totaling 20.1mb each showing up in my Win10 Pro 'Windows/Temp' folder. One of the hundreds of files in the 7 folders is titled "WindowsUpdate.20211011.170112.231.4.etl" (they all have different file names following the string. ie: 'WindowsUpdate.2021.........etl') in this series of files on my drive. What are they, and why are they constantly loading onto my computer?? Although they are not making much of a dent in my drive capacity, it is totaling almost 141mb and they show up all the time (seems every day or two after deletion).


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Google or bing "etl file extension". These are log files created by Microsoft Tracelog.

hsehestedt said:

Google or bing "etl file extension". These are log files created by Microsoft Tracelog.

hsehestedt, OK, but WHY are they taking up such a large space in my win10 'temp' folder? Aren't they in a 'log' file folder somewhere else in the windows folders? The OS is placing these in the temp folder for 'whatever(??)' reason, again, why there?

How do I stop these from popping up and taking up space IN the 'temp' folder. This has been happening within the last few months/updates, not like they have been showing up throughout windows 10 installation...


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I don't know the answer to that, and I have not made any attempt to research it. But let's assume that your windows drive is 500GB. All 7 of those folders are consuming 0.028% of your storage space. Is that even worth the time to bother investigating this?

I'm not trying to be wise guy here, but if you are that short on space that it becomes necessary to track down and eliminate such tiny minute consumers of space then it would be my assertion that you simply don't have enough storage for your needs. In that event I would consider replacing the storage with a larger unit or targeting things that consume a lot more space such as deletion of old drivers, Windows upgrade files, etc. If you have not done so already, consider running the Disk Cleanup utility to free up space. Also, utilities such as Tree Size from Jam Software might help in locating files and folders that consume a lot of space, etc.

Moving some data files or even applications to a secondary drive (if that's a possibility in your configuration) might be another option to consider.

Again, apologies for not having a direct answer regarding those files, but it's my opinion that spending a lot of time to try to eliminate a paltry 140 MB of files is a waste of time when you can very likely find things to eliminate that will save many times that amount of space.