If you’re a Chrome user like me, beware of the latest Google Chrome update preceeding 16.0.912.63. This version has a problem with the way the database is sorting through web traffic. It was putting over 20 GB of data of .sst files in
C:\Users\%username%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\IndexedDB\ directory.
SST files from my experience is like a developer’s placeholder file. Something that acts like cache and gets destroyed as soon as you’re done with it. However, in this case the file never gets destroyed and actually multiplies.
Personally I didn’t even notice until my antivirus seemed like it was stuck in the same directory for over 4 hours. It was then that I noticed the size it was chewing up on my hard drive.
Here’s what didn’t work:
1. Uninstalling – even removing the registry keys with Revo uninstaller for 64 bit machines
2. removing Google sync services and re-applying as I figured it was trying to grab my bookmarks and history
3. Moving the directory elsewhere -it’s not the size of the volume that’ the problem it’s the number of files. Each one being around 2KB, it calculated it would take close to 8 hours to move.
Here’s what did work:
1. Uninstalling Google Chrome
2. Manually deleting the files via an elevated command line (akin to del *.sst)
It does take some time, mine was little more than 4 hours on a Solid State Drive, but it did all eventually disappear. On the new Chrome releases it appears okay. So hopefully this fix saves your bacon and hard disk space.
-Dexter