How to delete Notepad cache in Windows 11 Pro?

Question

Hello,

I used Notepad (just regular Notepad, not Notepad++) to open a somewhat sensitive file on a USB drive, then closed Notepad and removed the USB drive. Now I notice that when I open Notepad again, it automatically opens up the same file even with the USB drive not plugged in, so it obviously cached the file somewhere. Where is this cache? I'd like to shred the file. I looked in Users/<username>AppData/Roaming/, but I see nothing there for Notepad. There is no option to get the file location from within Notepad itself, something like 'File--> properties'. Both 'File --> Open' and 'File--> Save as' just default to my documents folder, and the file in question is not there. I am using Windows 11 Pro.

I know that Notepad settings can be changed to not open content from the previous session, but my priority right now is shredding the file from my drive.

Thanks for any help.

Answer 1

Resetting Notepad should purge the confidential file from the caches.

Open Settings, Apps.

Click Installed Apps.

Search for Notepad.

Click on the ellipsis icon adjacent to "Notepad", and click "Advanced options"

.

In the resulting screen, click "Reset".

Answer 2

The Notepad cache can be found as follows:

• Open File Explorer and copy/paste the following into the address bar > press enter: %localappdata%\Packages\Microsoft.WindowsNotepad_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalState\TabState

Answer 3

Thanks for that. That folder had 3 binary .bin files, all about 1 KB in size, which is too small to contain my file, unless it's perhaps using compression. I tried shredding them anyway, but Bitdefender kept saying I didn't have the permissions to do it, even though I'm logged in as admin (just a personal PC). I then tried Ramesh's solution above, and the files did get removed.

Shredding would've made me feel better (since deleted files are technically still there until something writes to that memory), but at least the files are deleted now.

Thanks for the help.

Answer 4

Thanks for that. I did follow the procedure to reset Notepad and delete the data. Shredding would've made me feel better, but I wasn't able to do that (see my reply to _AW_).

Thanks for the help

Answer 5

Glad that info helped. To prevent the files from being recovered by a third-party data recovery tool, use SDelete with the -c switch.

-c	Clean free space.

These links can help.

• SDelete - Sysinternals | Microsoft Learn
• How to use SDelete to ensure deleted data is gone for good (see "Manage free disk space")