Clean up after your Zune, reclaim gigs of PC storage
Since we don’t all have 500 GB hard drives in our mobile computing devices, this tip from Zune Boards will help us eek out a little storage capacity when using a Zune. Apparently, when the Zune software converts video files, it leaves a temporary copy on your hard drive that just sits there until you wipe it out. The simple trick to clean out these space-wasters is to view the properties of your hard drive and choose the "Disk Cleanup" option. Along with the usual suspects of temporary files, offline web pages and such, you’ll see a selection for "Zune temporary converted files". Looks like they’re not too temporary if they keep hanging around!
If you’d rather just remove these in the Zune software, click the Device Settings menu and look for the Conversion Settings option. Here you can set the folder location for the temp files and clear them out with the "clear history" button. Some Zune owners on the Zune Board site indicated that these left-overs were taking up 6 Gigabytes or more on their hard drive. Sounds to me like these should automatically disappear on a regular basis by design…
(via Zune Thoughts)
It should be noted that deleting these “temporary” files will cause the Zune software to reconvert any previously converted media on future syncs with the device. Larger media files may take significant time to sync in the future if these are deleted.
13.2 GB for me. Thanks Kevin, Thanks GoodThings2Life. Went ahead and deleted on a hunch that most of that space was taken up with files of old video podcasts that have been viewed.
Looks like that’s what’s happening, as after a sync, I now have only 111 MB of Zune temporary converted files. Not removing the converted files of aged video podcasts is a bug, the storage equivalent of a memory leak (but with a different workaround: Disk Cleanup as opposed to Shutdown for memory leaks).