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When using Blender, I noticed that the file viewer showed more files than file explorer, even with show hidden files and all the rest enabled. I began to wonder why, and then I noticed that they all had ~$ in front of them and were known as owner files. Here are the files on my desktop:

Files on desktop picture
All of the files (and only the files) with ~ or ~$ in front of them are invisible in file explorer and on my desktop. Looking around, it appears to have something to do with desktop.ini hiding folders and items as 'special', but I don't know enough about it to come up with a way to display them.

So the question is, how can I display these owner files?

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2 Answers 2

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These are just temporary files and should be deleted off disk after corresponding application closes. Normally you don't need neither do any action upon them nor even see them. It's the reason why Explorer didn't show this kind of files. But sometimes (i.e., when program hangs) these files remains forever and just wasting space on disk. If you want to see them in Explorer, use menu View -- check Hidden items if you are Windows 8.x user, or Tools -- Folder Options -- View -- Show hidden files, folders, and drives in other versions of Windows. The only reasonable action you can do after -- just wipe them.

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  1. Open "Folder Options" (type it into the start menu search bar).
  2. Go to View.
  3. Uncheck "Hide protected operating system files (recommended)".

This allows owner files to appear so that they can be deleted. (You can also enable showing hidden files and folders as well as file extensions). It took me a small while to find it because I didn't expect owner files to be considered protected OS files, but I suppose bad things could happen if you deleted them.

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