Rapidly eating up disk space

Bob Hobart

Posts: 81   +0
My computer is rapidly eating up disk space. I have worked with Broni to remove any virus or malware twice and he has indicated my computer is virus and malware free and recommended I come over to this thread. Something is using up my disk space. I look at overall space used vs space in all directories and it does not match. Overall space used increases and space in all directories is staying basically the same. Everytime I log on it uses up an additional 200Mbytes and I am running out of diskspace quickly. Can you please help me figure out how I can stop this activity and get back my diskspace. Thanks,...
 
Windows won't show the size of system files such as the swap file, page file, and Windows-generated drive backup images and restore files. To see them, download and install a tiny free program called WinDirStat, when in the program click on your boot drive and let it analyze your disk space. You should then see 2 or 3 large boxes among all the small files, hover the cursor over them and it will show the file name at the bottom of the window (page file, swap file, hibernation file, etc.). All can be reduced or eliminated by you setting the page file size or moving it to another drive, turning off hibernation, turning off System restore, etc. Log files, temp files, and index files can all be moved to another drive or partition. Ccleaner is a great free program to keep your system free of junk files, internet cache, and registry entries, and should be run at least weekly. It's a constant battle to preserve disk space, but these few tweaks will make it a lot easier.
 
Most of the disk space is unexpectedly disappearing into one or more of several places - like recycle bin and system restore storage. Already mentioned above is pagefile/swapfile, and another is hibernation file. Occasionally system dumps take up space.

Recycle bin - you might be familiar with that - it's where your deleted files go, and it is quite easy to empty. Right-click on the recycle bin icon and select Empty recycle bin.

Pagefile - used as overflow for your PC real memory. Typically 1.5 x the size of real memory, but that is stupid if your real memory is 4Gb or more. You might prefer a smallish and fixed pagefile in that case. See http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/16989-63-what-size-give-pagefile

Hiberfil.sys - used as a place to store the entire memory in current use when your PC goes into hibernation. Foolishly, once the hibernation file is created, it takes up nearly as much space as your real memory, and is never deleted again until you do so yourself, and then disable hibernation. You dont see this unless you give yourself rights to see hidden and system files in explorer. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/15140/what-is-hiberfil.sys-and-how-do-I-delete-it/

System restore - this is the one that does not get included in disk space totals. It is controllable by adjusting the percentage of disk space you are willing to devote to it. Here is a link to someone I previously advised on this topic https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/where-does-my-space-on-the-system-drive-go.165532/ see post #5

System error dumps - if you are in a habit of running poorly written software, your system might often crash, and when it does, a dump will be taken, which can be controlled as to whether it is a full memory dump (there goes 4Gb !) or a minimal dump. These dumps are very rarely of any use to anyone, so http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/265378-45-memory-dump-files

Log files - much software involved in PC communications and protection likes to log it's activity, but never draws the users attention to what it is doing (eating up large amounts of drive space). https://www.techspot.com/community/topics/where-does-my-space-on-the-system-drive-go.165532/ again, this time posts 10 and 11
 
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I am currently using WinDirStat as directed earlier to see where I can see the Disk Space being used up in. I wrote the disk usage spaces down so I can compare after a weeks worth of usage. I will check these also,.... Thanks,....
 
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