How to Clear File Explorer History in Windows 10
File Explorer, as the name suggests is a Explorer built into Windows OS. It allows the user to navigate to drives, folders, external drives, recycle bin, home groups, shared drives and much more. File Explorer keeps the history of items you’ve searched using the address bar and also keeps the history of files and folders you’ve used. Clearing the File Explorer history, will remove anything file explorer has ever saved.
In this guide, I will provide two solutions focused on clearing file explorer history, (manually and automatically).
Solution 1: Clear File Explorer History manually
Hold the Windows Key and Press E to open File Explorer. Click View -> Options -> Change Folder and Search Options from the top menu.
Then choose General, and click Clear under Privacy Section.
Solution 2: Clear File Explorer History automatically
Right Click on your desktop and choose New -> Text Document. Paste the following content into the text document and choose File -> Save As. Name the File as deletehistory.bat and set the file type to All Files.
Del /F /Q %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\*
Del /F /Q %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\AutomaticDestinations\*
Del /F /Q %APPDATA%\Microsoft\Windows\Recent\CustomDestinations\*
REG Delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\RunMRU /VA /F
REG Delete HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\TypedPaths /VA /F
This will create the script, to delete File Explorer History. You can double-click this script to run it once, or you can Schedule a Task to run it on your set times.
Press the Windows Key to pull up Start Menu on your keyboard and without clicking anywhere, type in “Task Scheduler” and Press Enter on your keyboard.
In the Task Scheduler click on “Create Basic Task”, from the right pane.
Under “Name” put in “Delete File History” and click Next.
Choose how frequently your file explorer history should be deleted (Daily/Weekly/Monthly) and click Next.
In the next Window in the second textbox, choose what time of the day your history should be deleted and click Next two times.
Click on “Browse” and select the file “deletehistory.bat” on the desktop and click OK and then Next and Finish.
Close the Task Scheduler and thats it!
