I lost 300GB of space overnight? Help!

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lovewinter

Reputable
Nov 3, 2015
3
0
4,510
Hi. I have no idea what has happened. I have a 1TB hard drive and I know I had around 350gb free as of yesterday. I woke up this morning, and had only 20MB of space left! My computer was rapidly crashing with so little to work with, I ran disk-cleanup and gained back a minuscule few gigs of space so the computer can function but I have no idea what has happened or how to fix it.

Windows did not preform an update
I've always had auto-backup turned off
I did not download anything
I have ZoneAlarm antivirus + firewall and it shows no viruses
Malwarebytes only showed a few tracking cookies

I have Windows 7 64bit (legal & activated copy)
16GB of ram
i5-2400 cpu
1TB western digital HD (Unsure of exact model)
 
Solution
getochkn
https://windirstat.info/

run that, it will help you figure out what folder the space is in.

I had the same problem. turned out the VPN client I use was going weird and creating a huge LOG file, that was 58GB and then stopped because my drive filled to 0, kept crashing me out. Used that program, found a 58GB txt file, deleted, uninstalled and reinstalled the VPN client, no prob since.
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getochkn

getochkn

Polypheme
Jul 2, 2006
12,407
54
65,040
https://windirstat.info/

run that, it will help you figure out what folder the space is in.

I had the same problem. turned out the VPN client I use was going weird and creating a huge LOG file, that was 58GB and then stopped because my drive filled to 0, kept crashing me out. Used that program, found a 58GB txt file, deleted, uninstalled and reinstalled the VPN client, no prob since.
 
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Solution
L

lovewinter

Reputable
Nov 3, 2015
3
0
4,510
Thank you.
Well, this worked, but I have no explanation for what happened.
I have an external drive I'd had for years that I have misc. things saved on in the event that I reformat, reinstall an OS, or just want to get them off my main drive. This includes things like photos, old games, etc. A lot of them are in rar format. The other night I took a few out and extracted them and this seems to have caused the problem;
The total size I took out was no more than about 20GB. But for some reason some HUGE temp files were created during the process, totaling MUCH larger than the original extraction
6 folders totaling exactly 33.6GB each
10+ folders totaling exactly 5.5GB each
These were all created yesterday.

Windows would not let me delete them, saying they were in use. I was able to delete them within windirstat. It totaled over 260GB.
What the heck? Are these rars corrupted somehow? Infected somehow? I don't know. But I have my space back now. Thank you again.
 
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