A few software programs are available to view and delete the contents of index.dat files. We have mentioned some of them earlier here at Ghacks like the index.dat viewer or the index.dat suite. Another tool for the purpose is the index.dat analyzer which can display and clean the contents of index.dat files as well.

If you want to prevent that Windows is writing data to those files in future sessions you need to set the file attribute to read-only. Another possibility would be to run CCleaner regularly (this can be automated) to clean the index.dat files.

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An index.dat viewer is a tool that can display the information stored in those database files. Index.dat Scanner is such a viewer that can scan all index.dat files on the computer that it can located or a specific one that the user selects from the system. The scan takes some time but results are displayed as they are found.

The software program will list all of its findings in a list that can be exported as a text document. It did find more than 4000 entries on the test computer although Internet Explorer itself was rarely used on it. The information listed in the index.dat databases list recently opened files, urls that the user visited in the past and cookies that have been stored during browsing sessions.

The index.dat files are by default hidden locked system files that cannot be deleted in Windows directly. Several tools like CCleaner exist that can clear the contents of index.dat files on a Windows system directly which is probably the easiest way to clean those files. Index.dat Scanner can be used to check if all traces have been deleted in the files.

It is obviously important to run the cleanup regularly because the files get populate whenever a file gets opened or Internet Explorer opens a website.

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