So I have 2 hard drives in my current box. Both 80 gigs. The main HD seems to be losing tons of space and I can't figure out what's going on. The actual capacity of my main drive is about 75 gigs with 9 currently free. (as viewed in properties of "C" drive. Same if I highlight all the folders within C drive. Most of that is stored in Documents and Settings (1.5 gigs for windows, 1.5 for program files, the rest in D&S). When I highlight all the files withing "ofberenonehandsdocuments" I get only 18 gigs. What gives? Is there a hidden folder somewhere that is storing huge amounts of data?

I have 2 ideas. 1 is temporary data being stored for file sharing/bittorent. The other is back-up stuff from Nero.

Relevant info:
Firefox
XP SP2
Shareaza (currently downloading about 27 gigs of stuff, about half done, 5 downloads total))
Nero (currently burning lots of DVD's to keep space open.
A little spyware.
etc
etc
etc
...

Is it maybe windows restore points and such? Right click on my computer and go in to Properties - select the System Restore Tab. I betcha you got a few hundred MB used up for that.

Heh. I keep several thousands of ebooks and such so I know the feeling.

The best thing I find to find wasted space is to do a normal search for files/folders to find *.* bigger than 15000000 bytes.

It finds large books, ISOs or other large files, temp files I've forgotten about (Windows doesn't seem to clean my "%Local Settings%/Temp" folder, ever) etc.

Other than that, as Chainsaw said, bring the restore point size down, bring the Recycle Bin reserved size down, set your browsing cache to something small, clean out your Local Settings/Temp and WINDOWS/TEMP directories, and you should find most things. I don't think defragging would do anything for NTFS space-wise. If your block size of your file system is too small, you'll see that files take up a lot more space than they should (look at the "Size of File" and "Size on Disk" and see if they differ a lot for a general file - if the Space On Disk is a lot bigger, then you know to use a different block size in the future...).

Don't forget that your drive sizes are misrepresented. A 120gig drive is really closer to 115 and such, so if you have 100gigs full it looks like it's more than you feel it should be.

I had only 25 MB in my windows temp file. Deleted it.

I turned down system restore. It was set at max (12% or 9100MB ). It is down to 2500MB now, though no change was shown in my actual free space, even after restart.

Maybe I can't remember, because I just woke up, but how do I access local settings?

A search for various file sizes yielded nothing useful at all. Only things I knew about.



So, again, it all seems to be in one area. If I go to "Documents and Settings" and check properties for the main user (not the "all users" folder) I see 72.8 GB (62.3GB on disc). When I open that folder and highlight all the folders (Cookies, Desktop, Favorites, My documents, Start Menu) I get 18.9GB (18.9GB size on disc).

It looks to me like there is a hidden folder inhere, but I can't find it.


BTW, this seems to be getting bigger as I have to burn more things off to keep the same space open.

Could be you have some kind of worm. I got one through Kazaa years ago that would automatically (and constantly) replicate itself into junk files and chew up my free space. Got to 5GB before I caught on. It didn't create a hidden folder... but if you haven't run a virus scan or anything yet, it might be worth a try.

I only really run spyware stuff. I know there is at least one good free anti-virus program. Could anybody recommend one?


*edit* I ran AVG and found 3 trojan horses, but they were on the drive WITHOUT problems. Grrrrr, somebody help me before my brain melts.

Posted by ofberenonehand I had only 25 MB in my windows temp file. Deleted it. I turned down system restore. It was set at max (12% or 9100MB ). It is down to 2500MB now, though no change was shown in my actual free space, even after restart. Maybe I can't remember, because I just woke up, but how do I access local settings?

Documents and settings/Username/Local Settings

It's hidden.

Do the search for all large files

Also, get a real av- AVG is absolute shit and foundless than 30% of the 30,000 malware I tested it with. Don't except it to catch a cold. Get Bitdefender.

That's what i was looking for. Thanks. I couldn't remember how to get to that folder. There was a hidden folder within local settings called 'application data' and a shareaza subfolder with 54GB of partial downloads.

The final size of everything I'm downloading now is about 28GB. Is it normal for the files to expand while downloading or do I have extra junk in there? I plan to wait until these ones are done downloading to see if everything gets moved or not.

BTW, this did not come up in a search for large files. That is how I've found a path to that folder on other computers though. Not sure why it didn't work this time.

I'll upgrade the virus scan. I just grabbed this one off download.com, because it was free.


THANKS!


*edit* I've looked and there are lots of 'incomplete' files for things that have already downloaded and been moved so I'm going to clear them out. Hope I don't screw anything up.

And I've now got 28 gigs free. Oh happy day!

Posted by ofberenonehand That's what i was looking for. Thanks. I couldn't remember how to get to that folder. There was a hidden folder within local settings called 'application data' and a shareaza subfolder with 54GB of partial downloads. The final size of everything I'm downloading now is about 28GB. Is it normal for the files to expand while downloading or do I have extra junk in there? I plan to wait until these ones are done downloading to see if everything gets moved or not.

Why not try moving one of the files out and seeing if it downloads fine? You can alwave move it back if it doesn't work anymore, and that would show you if it was required or not.

BTW, this did not come up in a search for large files. That is how I've found a path to that folder on other computers though. Not sure why it didn't work this time.

Maybe your default view doesn't show hidden files and folders?

I'll upgrade the virus scan. I just grabbed this one off download.com, because it was free.

Bitdefender is also free

yeah, most of those bit torrent downloads are probably parsed out as individual 2mb rar files .btc files or whatever they are called in progress. Some clients create the files and reserve the space for the incoming data to avoid problems with a full hard drive - your client should be configurable on how it manages this space and where it puts it.

Most good clients will delete the partially downloaded files when you cancel the download, but if you restart or something and don't exit the program cleanly and never resume the downloads they just build up.

Posted by Beryl Bitdefender is also free

http://www.joojant...c.php?pid=133#p133

It was actually more like 10-15 large files, most of which I've downloaded successfully. It moves the final file when I'm done and deletes them if I cancel the download so I'm not sure why some got saved. It was only about 1 in 10 downloads though, so it seems like a fluke of some sort. I unhid the folder so I'll just check and clear it every now and then.

BTW thanks for the lead. I had 300mb of old temp files in %APP DATA% I hadn't thought about looking through.