Hard drive almost full for no reason I can think of! Help!

Mason Methot · Jan 24, 2016

I have a 1TB hard drive on my PC. I downloaded a lot (and I mean A LOT) of The Simpsons episodes but not enough to fill it even half way. About 3 or 4 days ago I looked and my hard drive said it had 212GB left of 1TB. That was a bit strange to me but I left it and went online to see what another hard drive would cost and what I should get. Just a few minutes ago I checked again to see if I could delete anything useless and I am now at 133GB left of 1TB!!!! I didn't even download anything to to fill over 50 GB!!!!
What could be causing this? I ran CCleaner and it removed 2GB, I just deleted about 4GB worth of programms and stuff but I can't find anything that will take up so much! (Other than GTA V, Simpsons episodes, videos, and 1,000+ photos)

TIA!

USAFRet · Jan 24, 2016

WinDirStat can help visualize where you space is going.

iceblitzed · Jan 24, 2016

shadow copies might be the problem. Windows sometimes likes to backup files. to delete these "ghost" shadow copies you need to run this in the command prompt:

vssadmin Delete Shadows /For=C: /All where C:

is replaced with drive letter.
This won't delete any of your files just the shadow copies.

bambiboom · Jan 24, 2016

Mason Methot,

That's mysterious. CCleaner should find error logs, setup and upgrade, and temp files.

I had a similar, but much smaller scale experience recently as I was setting up a new C:\ on a Dell Precision T5500. With only Windows 7 Pro and some utilities, C:\ showed as 100GB. However, in my case it was because I had not disabled or limited the size of the pagefile. That will grow to be the same size as the amount of RAM and since that system has 48GB of RAM, that explained the overage.

I also had an odd very large file on my main system that had kept over time a lot of downloaded media files plus and every version of the Quadro drivers- with all the utilities those were 200MB each. Check the User and App data files in case there's more than one versions of the Simpson's- D-oh! - or do a search in Explorer for all the files with the extension of those files and any other videos- which can be large files- to check for duplicates.

The only other items I can think of is many restore points or that there are automatic backups or system images.

In Control Panel Folder Options, enable the Hidden files to be shown.

Now I'm very curious,...

Cheers,

BambiBoom

Mason Methot · Jan 25, 2016

bambiboom :

Mason Methot,

That's mysterious. CCleaner should find error logs, setup and upgrade, and temp files.

I had a similar, but much smaller scale experience recently as I was setting up a new C:\ on a Dell Precision T5500. With only Windows 7 Pro and some utilities, C:\ showed as 100GB. However, in my case it was because I had not disabled or limited the size of the pagefile. That will grow to be the same size as the amount of RAM and since that system has 48GB of RAM, that explained the overage.

I also had an odd very large file on my main system that had kept over time a lot of downloaded media files plus and every version of the Quadro drivers- with all the utilities those were 200MB each. Check the User and App data files in case there's more than one versions of the Simpson's- D-oh! - or do a search in Explorer for all the files with the extension of those files and any other videos- which can be large files- to check for duplicates.

The only other items I can think of is many restore points or that there are automatic backups or system images.

In Control Panel Folder Options, enable the Hidden files to be shown.

Now I'm very curious,...

Cheers,

BambiBoom

I couldn't find anything that would be taking up so much space. I dunno, maybe tomorrow I'll dig deeper and sort out photos and stuff. But still, I only built this PC like 4 or 5 months ago, hard drive shouldn't be this filled.

Mason Methot · Jan 25, 2016

I've just deleted a ton of stuff now and freed up about 100gigs of space! It's a start, but still not as much as I hope to regain.

jsmithepa · Jan 25, 2016

When stuff like this happens I search the drive for files, say updated the last few days and at least, am thinking 50MB. I sort them by date, then by size, and that usually reveals AHA!

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Hard drive almost full for no reason I can think of! Help!

Mason Methot

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USAFRet

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