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Old May 11th 20, 02:28 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
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Posts: 1,296
Default Why is this folder so slow? (follow-up)

On 4/26/2020 9:24 PM, Yousuf Khan wrote:
I have a folder on one of my SSD drives that takes 8 to 10 hours to back
up. It is only about 1.4 GB, but it is allocated 2.4 GB of space
altogether, and there are 580,000 files here. Indicates that per file
it's using up a little bit over half of a cluster on average. File
system is NTFS.

Meanwhile, this same drive can backup the remainder of the drive in
under 2 hours, and the remainder of the drive is 390 GB! Is NTFS this
inefficient for small files like this?

Â*Â*Â*Â*Yousuf Khan


Okay, so after fixing the problem with my News folder, I kept
researching what these millions of little files were, that were clogging
up my News folder. The files had an extension of WDSEML. Later I found
out that these same files are also there in Email folders, hundreds of
thousands of them too.

Initially, I thought that these must be the bodies of the messages that
Thunderbird uses to store emails and newsgroup messages. But after a bit
of research, I found out that Thunderbird itself has no use for these
files. Thunderbird does generate them, but it doesn't use them itself.
Instead it is generated only for the benefit of Windows' Search and
Indexing application. Windows Search uses it to be able to let you
search messages through the Windows Search box. So once Thunderbird
generates these files for Windows Search, it no longer has any use for
them anymore, as it stores its own internal data in a different set of
files. In fact, these WDSEML files are saved copies of individual
messages out of Thunderbird's own database. So Thunderbird maintains it
own database, but it never cleans up these copies ever in its life.
WDSEML means "Windows Desktop Search Email", in fact. I also think this
is only a specific problem with Thunderbird under Windows, it probably
isn't an issue in Thunderbird under other OS'es like Linux.

You can easily delete all of these messages, but of course Thunderbird
will regenerate them again as they come in. So what you have to do is
tell Thunderbird not to generate these files for Windows anymore. You go
into Thunderbird's options menu and turn it off (Tools → Options, then
select Advanced → General → System Integration → Allow Windows search to
search messages).

https://fileinfo.com/extension/wdseml

You can also delete them more easily by searching for and deleting just
the folders in which they reside, rather than the individual files.
These folders have an extension called *.MOZMSGS.

Yousuf Khan