Deleting Extraneous Files

The following is a list of files you might want to keep purged from your file system, especially backups.

• .tmp

Temporary files left behind by programs. These are safe to delete system-wide.

desktop.ini

Folder customizations stored by Windows.

.DS_Store

Folder customizations stored by Mac OS X.

thumbs.db

Thumbnails generated by Windows for folder that had picture view set

.nfs???????????????????????? (24 ?'s)

Chunks of data from NFS. Used during normal operation but can become stranded by abrupt dismounts. If the file is in use, it will simply be re-created by NFS.

~/thumbnails/*

Thumbnails generated by the Nautilus file manager. While it's generally a good idea to keep these, you may want to delete them from backup or delete old ones with find ~/thumbnails -type f -atime +[days] -delete.