Have started working my way through the log for 9 February (kicking myself for not having kept at least one of the clipping files to give me a time stamp as there are thousands of entries – all that I have seen so far being attributable to four ip addresses all of which appear to be spiders/web crawler s – using SemrushBot, AhrefsBot, BingBot and Sogou web. So I must ask another question:
3. Is it possible for web crawlers to generate Clippings files in the data directory? Surely it should not be?