How to find the location of the Scheduled Tasks folder

Question

I have seen references online that state that  Scheduled Tasks  in Windows are stored in  SystemRoot  Tasks  which I think usually equates to C  Windows Tasks   However  I observe that while that folder exists on my Windows 7 system  Scheduled tasks doesn t use it    My system appears to use  C  Windows System32 Tasks   I have studied the Environment variables and there doesn t seem to be anything related to Scheduled Tasks there   How do I discover which folder is used for Scheduled tasks

User · Answer

Tasks are saved in filesystem AND registry

Tasks are stored in 3 locations: 1 file system location and 2 registry locations.

File system:

C:\Windows\System32\Tasks

Registry:

HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Taskcache\Tasks
HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Schedule\Taskcache\Tree

So, you need to delete a corrupted task in these 3 locations.

User · Answer

Looks like TaskCache registry data is in      HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Schedule TaskCache      on my Windows 10 PC  i e  add Schedule before TaskCache and TaskCache has an upper case C

User · Answer

For Windows 7 and up  scheduled tasks are not run by cmd exe  but rather by MMC  Microsoft Management Console    SystemRoot  Tasks should work on any other Windows version though

User · Answer

On newer versions of Windows  Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016  the tasks you create are located in C  Windows Tasks   They will have the extension  job  For example if you create the task  DoWork  it will create the task in  C  Windows Tasks DoWork job

User · Answer

I want to extend  Jan answer  It s seems  that Task Scheduler 1 0 API uses C  Windows Tasks folder for create and enumerate tasks  this example   while Task Scheduler 2 0 API uses C  Windows System32 Tasks to create and enumerate tasks  this example   It s also seems  that windows console utility schtasks and GUI utility taskschd msc uses Task Scheduler 2 0 API  P S  I found  that if task placed in C  Windows Tasks and have not set AccountInformation  then task won t be displayed in windows console and GUI schedulers  If you set AccountInformation  even  quot  quot  for SYSTEM account  and set flag TASK FLAG RUN ONLY IF LOGGED ON - task will be displayed in all standard applications  Solution found here

User · Answer

There are multiple issues with the MMC however as on almost every PC in my business the ask scheduler API will not open and has somehow been corrupted   So you cannot edit  delete or otherwise modify tasks that were developed before the API decided not to run anymore  The only way we have found to fix that issue is to totally wipe away a persons profile under the C  Users  area and force the system to recreate the log in once the person logs back in   This seems to fix the API issue and it works again  however the tasks are often not visible anymore to that user since the tasks developed are specific to the user and not the machine in Windows 7   The other odd thing is that sometimes  although not with any frequency that can be analyzed  the tasks still run even though the API is corrupted and will not open   The cause of this issue is apparently not known but there are many  fixes  described on various websites  but the user profile deletion and adding anew seems to work every time for at least a little while   The tasks are saved as XML now in WIN 7  so if you do find them in the system32 tasks folder you can delete them  or copy them to a new drive and then import them back into task scheduler   We went with the system scheduler software  from Splinterware though since we had the same corruption issue multiple times even with the fix that does not seem to be permanent

[windows] How to find the location of the Scheduled Tasks folder

Tasks are saved in filesystem AND registry

File system:

Registry:

Examples related to windows

Examples related to scheduled-tasks