New Mystery Files Being Added to Hard Drive

[freddyprinze]

I am experiencing something weird with my computer. I do not know what you call them but when you open up an MSWord document and keep it open you get a temporary file with the prefix ~$FILENAME in the folder that the original file is located. My issue is that I am seeing these ~$FILENAME files even after I have closed the original file. This is not occurring every time but sporadically. All my antivirus, spyware and firewalls are up to date and my system is "clean" I am not a techie but if anyone has any ideas it would be appreciated. Thanks in advance. :)

[sonick]

They are likely auto-backup copies of the files, in case your computer crashes/freezes when you're working on the documents\.

[Toronto]

They are likely auto-backup copies of the files, in case your computer crashes/freezes when you're working on the documents\.

Yeah this is what they are. They should disappear when you close the file but I've had some stay before. I just delete them.

[freddyprinze]

Thanks guys. I never noticed my computer saving files like this before. I do delete them but I was hoping it's not an indication of a hard drive failure or something like that--yikes!!! Time to back-up my files. ;)

[cipher]

Yeah this is what they are. They should disappear when you close the file but I've had some stay before. I just delete them.

The "~files" stay when the system crashes, loses power or the software (Word, Excel etc) that created them crash. We have zillions of them on our servers and we have a script that deletes them every weekend.