DAT file

Just a simple question what is the Index.dat file for under the Temperary Internet Files? also how can you view the content on it to see what is on it? and if I were to delete it would it corrupt IE?

 

Hi, Kayz ~

The index.dat files are a collection of addresses of the HTML, images you opened in your browser, cookies placed on your computer by sites you visited recently, all the URLs you ever opened on your machine and kind of records that contain references to the pages that were not saved in the temporary internet files which are usually dynamic files. These are the most dangerous records, as they may contain sensitive information like passwords, credit card numbers, etc.

They are so-called Internet Explorer (IE) databases where IE says it keeps track of the recent stuff you did related (more or less) with internet browsing. The reason it keeps this databases is the easy retrieval of the information, otherwise it would have to scan the temp directories every time it is searching for cache files.

Cleaning the temporary internet files, cookies and history files won't help as it will only remove the files but it will keep the records in the index files.

You can in fact view the index.dat contents with apps such as;

• Index.DAT Viewer V2.1
• Complete Internet Cleanup Pro 2.1.1
• Hex Editor XVI32

but nothing in there would be of interest to you or the average user.

Despite what the above referenced Windows BBS link mentions, there are in fact excellent means, Spider 1.16 being the best, and reasons to delete the index.dat files. For the sake of brevity, please refer to my posts in these links:

• I.E. 6 Error
• Cookie Invasion
• IE6 only saves images as BMPs

No, IE would not be corrupted by deleting them but in fact you may well prevent corruption due to known issues and limitations.