When Maya crashes, it promises to save a duplicate of your file. But where does Maya save crash files in Windows 10? And how can we use this knowledge to save GIGABYTES in storage on our hard drives? It’s all in a hidden-by-default directory.

Maya saves crash files in this Windows 10 folder

By default, the folder we need is hidden. You won’t be able to navigate to it manually – unless you’ve already changed Windows folder options and set hidden files and folders to display.

The easier option is to just copy/paste

 C:\Users\Login_Name\AppData\Local\Temp

to your folder bar, where ‘login_name’ is the account name you’re logged in under.

I recommend creating a shortcut to this location on your desktop. I find myself going to this folder all the time. But not just for crash files!

Save tons of disk space

Maya saves crash  files here in Windows 10. But this folder is a scratch folder that is also used by programs to write temporary files to disk as you work.

This is no big deal – except programs that crash don’t clean up their temporary files. And some programs just flat out don’t clean up their temp files at all!

This means that this folder can grow to gigabytes in size! All clogging up your C drive. And if you’re using an SSD drive (which I highly recommend) you are probably already hurting for disk space.

So let’s delete the extra data in  our temp folder. If you sort the folder by file size, you may see some really big files float to the top. Adobe Premiere and Photoshop save temp working files here, so do Autodesk’s Maya and Mudbox. That means you may have gigabytes of files stored in this hidden folder.

And since it is all temporary files, it is safe to delete all of it! I regularly clean out this folder just to recapture space on my disk. I simply select everything and hit Delete.

You will get an error about certain files and folder currently in-use in Windows – if so, just skip them and clean out the rest.