Transactional Replication: When to delete the initial snapshot
You dont have to manually cleanup the old/static snapshot files, the distribution cleanup agent will purge the old folders for you.

A bit of under the hood story of what and how snapshot files gets generated :

Basically, the snapshot agent creates snapshots for the subscribers to initialize. The snapshot folder will contain various types of files like -


.bcp => actual data files - either using native or character mode
.idx => Index creation statements
.sch => schema and table creation scripts
.dri => foreign and check constraints


These files are always kept in \\unc\folder with a timestamp value for the folder name. The folder name is the publication name.

So, everytime a snapshot is generated, a new timestamp value is used for the folder name and then the snapshot files are written to that folder.

Also, if you see that your distribution agent is not cleaning up the files, you can delete the older snapshot folders. But I would still troubleshoot - why distribution agent is not cleaning it up !!