Windows 11 Installer Folder Size

I don’t think this is related to typical Acrobat installer behavior. I just did a search top to bottom (system and hidden folders included) on my C drive and couldn’t find more than a few hundred MB of installation files for the entire Creative Cloud suite, let alone Acrobat. Granted, Acrobat itself is absurdly bloated LOL, but the setup files should be getting deleted once finished.

When I see temp files stacking up on a drive, my assumption is that there’s either some sort of lock (a la Group Policy) that is preventing the setup files from being deleted. I’ll bet if you match the date of some of the files on the PCs Event Viewer you’ll find an error relating to these files. 

I had a somewhat similar issue (self inflicted) when I set up certain folders on my workstation to generate real-time file backups which would then be copied to my local server (essentially using a type of software RAID). At some point I noticed the backup folders were significantly larger than the originals. 

What was happening was that since most programs had 15 min. AutoBack set up, each time the backup file was generated, a duplicate “backup.tmp” file was created as well (the failsafe copy generated during the AutoBack). On my PC these files were deleted once the AutoBack process completed, but the network folder just kept them because they were copies. Some of these were big 3D assembly files (300MB on up to a 2GB). I ended up just altering the file copy setup to ignore any of the temp backup files… Point being: it was obvious only in hindsight.

Anyway- Check how your Group Policy is interfacing with the setup procedures that Acrobat is using and if these files are getting set as “important” or system files. Hope this gives you some ideas!

We have the exact same issue where at least 5-10 users come to our service desk (Fleet of around 800 computers) and have their HD’s full. first we thought it were Windows update, but further investigation resulted in finding out it were all Adobe files. This is becoming such a problem, with no solution offered by Adobe anywhere, that we had to create a Powershell script that runs an checks the folder and then deletes these “Orphaned” installers. Cleaning up to 60-70GB in some cases. Since this is just a work around for now. I would like to see a permanent solutions to this problem. It is so bad that we run a report on Hard drives with less than 10 GB free and then having to preventative run the script.

Liked

You've got me curious.

I checked my latest Acrobat install on a Windows PC (C:\Program Fies\Adobe\Acrobat DC) and it's about 2.8GB. And .msi files are Windows installer files. You've deleted them, so it's hard to tell if they were multiple instances of downloading a single installer file, installers for several different versions of software, or some other kind of odd anomaly we can't otherwise account for.

This is a user-to-user forum, and I'm an end user just like you. Or more like your user, actually. Based on the information you've shared here I can't begin to advise you without a bunch more information. If you could provide information on what version of Windows, what version of Acrobat and ideally what the names of the .msi files you encountered, maybe I can help. But not without more information.

Sorry,

Randy