safe to delete windows defender scan and definition updates folders? Windows 7,8,8.1

Question

It looks like WD keeps a history of all scans and keep older definition files. Is it ok to delete the content of these two folder and let WD rebuild their content.

Anyway to disable WD to keep accumulating this history scans and delete old definitions?

I have already tried the free disk space function on Windows 8.1, but it didn't delete these WD files

Answer 1

There's a lot of threads to find in Google about this subject. It doesn't seem like Microsoft is willing to document this, but many people have just done it and I don't see any complaints. Should be safe enough.

If you want to be sure, just create a restore point, move all files to a temporary folder, reboot machine, update Windows and Windows Defender, reboot again and see if:

• everything still works (hint: you can try to download the EICAR antivirus test file from http://www.eicar.org/ to check the functionality of any antivirus application - this is a safe testfile that must be recognised as a virus by all AV's)
• all that data gets gets re-downloaded, in which case it probably doesn't make much sense to delete it :)

Good luck.