Don’t forget the FrontPageTempDir before upgrading SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 with WSS 3.0

Andreas Erben — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 22:45:00 GMT

When you encounter a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 installation that has been in place for a while and you need to plan for an upgrade to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, by all means check the available space on the system and make sure you have plenty of it.

So, the customer tells you, they were managing the server well, they installed all the service packs, and so on.

Then you find that there is a huge amount of space missing on the harddrive which is practically full.
Then you look closer and find out that the customer has hidden "protected operating system files", because it is recommended. And they wondered where all the free space has gone. You come into play here.
If in fact the TEMP folder of the Windows installation is whopping huge, then it might be because of "FrontPageTempDir" that may contain GigaBytes (or even TeraBytes) of junk data, depending on how much negligence was involved.

In SharePoint Portal Server 2003 SP2, a fix is included:

Time-outs occur during incremental crawls, and large files in a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services document library are not indexed correctly in SharePoint Portal Server 2003

You add a Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services Web site as a content source to your portal site. The Windows SharePoint Services Web site is hosted on a computer that is running Windows SharePoint Services Service Pack 1 (SP1). This site has a document library that contains large files. You configure SharePoint Portal Server 2003 to incrementally crawl the content source. Time-outs occur during incremental crawls, and large files in the document library are not indexed correctly. The large files are copied to and remain in the %Systemroot%\Temp\FrontPageTempDir folder on the server. The files are not deleted as expected when the files are no longer used by Windows SharePoint Services.

This means, that it is not so unlikely that the customer recently did not notice that the amount of free-space on the harddrive was shrinking significantly anymore, since the problem was fixed in SP2, but in fact there are a lot of those skeletons in the FrontPageTempDir closet that have to be found and buried before upgrading to MOSS 2007.

Andreas Erben's posts : Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

Don’t forget the FrontPageTempDir before upgrading SPS 2003 to MOSS 2007 with WSS 3.0