old policy files

[Joe_Matthews]

Not sure if this is the right board.  We have a customer that is getting ready to upgrade from R80.20 to R81.10.  In that process of looking at their current manager they noticed in the $FWDIR/conf directory that there are .pf, .W, and .set files from old policies that have long been deleted.  Some of these have been deleted years ago and some just last week.  They were all deleted from within console.  I thought I read somewhere that when you delete a policy that these files get removed.  I decided to do a test in my lab on R80.40 and cloned a policy and installed that policy and it created these files. I then installed the previous policy and purged any database revisions.  Installed database and installed policy again and those files are still there.  I tested purging before both deleting the policy and after deleting the policy.  This customer has gone through many policies over the years and there are a lot of files in there for polices that are no longer there.  Is it safe to remove them?  Should the manager be removing them when they are deleted from within console?  I could understand if there was a revision and you needed to revert but those have been cleared.  Thanks for any insight anyone can provide.

[the_rock]

I had couple of customers delete those and never had an issue. If you want to be 100% sure, maybe get TAC confirmation, but Im fairly certain its good.

[PhoneBoy]

Given the real configuration is now stored in a database as of R80.x, I’m fairly certain it’s safe to delete those files as they are only used as part of the policy compilation and installation process.

[Joe_Matthews]

Thank you both for your input.  I did want to provide an update for this and it would appear that yes you both are correct in that it would be safe to delete.  I did some more testing and in R81.10 it places those in $FWDIR/tmp/<some directory> and a bunch of sub directories.  When you delete a policy in R81.10 it does remove those files so it is doing its cleanup.  I just wanted to provide an update in case anyone else is questioning those files as they look at their manager and upgrading.