[German]A brief tip for Windows 10 users who suddenly suffer from a full system drive and find gigabyte-sized text files with names like SnipUsages or SnipUsagesUpload in the user profile.
Some Windows 10 users complain that their system drive suddenly has no free capacity. I have now come across a special case where I can even present a solution.
SnipUsagesUpload and SnipUsages occupy the disk
A few days ago I was contacted by an acquaintance who owns a notebook with Windows 10 and noticed that the 128 GByte SSD had hardly any free capacity left. I gave him a hint to look at Windows.old and try a disk cleanup. In addition, I gave him the tip to look at the drive assignment with tools like TreeSize. A few days later I got a hint that he found an unused Office365 on the machine. By uninstalling it, he was able to free a few gigabytes of memory on the SSD. But he ran into problems, as the following mail showed a few days later.
Hi Günter, due to lack of memory I cannot update to 1903. Under AppData/Local/ I found the test files SnipUsagesUpload and SnipUsages, which together occupy about 70 GB hard disk space and are actually even larger. Can I delete them? I would be happy if you could help me. A yes or no would be enough for me.
I then searched the Internet for the keywords SnipUsagesUpload and SnipUsages and found what I was looking for.
Multiple hits on the Internet
The most prominent and first hit I found on a search engine can be found in this reddit.com posting.
SnipUsagesUpload.txt and SnipUsages.txt
Anyone know what these are or where they come from before I delete this sht. SnipUsagesUpload.txt is 73.8GB and SnipUsages.txt is 15.4GB. Someone said this stf shouldnt be on my pc and that I should delete it but I feel like I should know what in the world files this big are before i send it to the netherworld
Anyone know what these are or where they come from before I delete this sht. SnipUsagesUpload.txt is 73.8GB and SnipUsages.txt is 15.4GB. Someone said this stf shouldnt be on my pc and that I should delete it but I feel like I should know what in the world files this big are before i send it to the netherworldSo also the well-known ‘error pattern, the files SnipUsagesUpload.txt and SnipUsages.txt has been mentioned. The files located in the profile folder occupy many gigabytes of drive capacity. Another user confirms this problem, but I did not find a clue to the cause. The same user on reddit.com complains about the capacity loss of his Surface Pro 4 in this thread. Another user on this website complains about a 2 GB text file. a massive capacity loss of his SSD.
All other hits to those file names appear in forums that deal with malware. I told the affected friend to delete the files and indicate that he should search for the cause.
The culprits: SnipInsights and SnipIT
During my search I first came across a program called SnipInsights, which is provided by Microsoft in its Microsoft AI School in source code here. The description says: Snip Insights is a cross-platform open source AI tool for creating intelligent screen copies. The AppUsageLogger.cs module contains references to exactly these two files. And then the acquaintance contacted me with another e-mail in which the veil was lifted:
after the deletion I had enough space again (instead of 3.6 Gb now 80 Gb) for the installation. Windows actually needs almost 10 Gb for this. On the search for the tool I probably found it. It is a small portable application called SnipIT. After the upgrade to 1903 and a restart I found the txt file SnipUsages in the local folder again. I have been using SnipIT on different Windows computers for years and never had any problems. I also find a txt file with 100 Gb strange. I removed it now. In the settings of the application there was no indication of any automatic protocol behavior???
Thanks again. Lost almost a whole day because of the fiddling. This used to be true for Linux, now it’s true for Windows. Could it be that Windows is increasingly falling out of time?
If you search for SnipIT, you will find it on the relevant sites such as CNet and softonic. The description says that SnipIT is an add-on for Windows Internet Explorer. The software is installed in the IE browser and offers the possibility to create screenshots and send them as text by email.