Where Did my Hard Drive Space Go?

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Where Did my Hard Drive Space Go?

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08-11-2008, 05:00 PM

Jason Dunn

Executive Editor

Join Date: Aug 2006

Posts: 29,160

Where Did my Hard Drive Space Go?

Don't you just hate it how, over time, hard drives fill up? I'm pretty strict about my data, keeping a tight reign on it (I should sit down with John Dvorak and give him some tips, he needs them). On my workstation and media editing station, I have 150 GB Western Digital Raptor hard drives - very fast, but not especially spacious in comparison to the 500 GB drives that ship in even the most humble desktop PC sold today. Normally this isn't a problem, but this morning my workstation PC report that I only had 11 GB of storage space left. Normally I hover around 30 GB or so of free space, so this was rather surprising. I did a disk cleanup, after deleting everything in the Foldershare Trash folder, and got back up to 16 GB of free space. But where was the rest of it?

The first thing I did was to try to get a handle on where the 139 GB of actual storage available on my drive was going. The Users folder? 55.1 GB. Not too surprising given that there's 35 GB of photos in there, 9 GB of documents and files, and 1 GB of files on my desktop. Figure the other 10 GB or so include my Outlook OST file (I use an Exchange server) and other assorted user files. What about Program Files? 13.3 GB in total - and the biggest folders in there are two games, totalling 9 GB. The Windows directory? 13 GB. There are no other folders on the hard drive any bigger than 100 MB outside these three directories. So where is my other 42 GB of storage?

In the XP days there were some little freeware programs that would help you visualize where your storage space went to, but in my searches this morning for something similar that worked on Vista, I could only find shareware programs costing $25 to $35. Is there really no generous soul out there that has created a free tool to do this job? I feel like there's almost no good free or cheap indy software out there any more - all the free tools are Web-based, and no one wants to develop applications for the desktop any more.

So where should I look for my missing 42 GB of storage? Suggestions welcome - although I may have already tried it. ;-)

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08-11-2008, 05:06 PM

marlof Contributing Editor Emeritus Join Date: Jun 2003 Posts: 1,350		I do know that the system restore points can happily chew away disk space. I've switched to Vista, and during the installation of applications, I saw something eat away large portions of my free hard disk space next to the space the apps took. In the end, I deleted all but the latest restore points and reclaimed over 50 GB of disk space... That said, I can't imagine system restore points causing all that lost space on your drives, since that would amount to a larger percentage than the maximum setting. __________________ enjoy being here while getting there Last edited by marlof; 08-11-2008 at 05:09 PM..

08-11-2008, 05:40 PM

The Yaz Thinker Join Date: Nov 2006 Posts: 340		Jason, Is this the machine that you do your video editing on? I know that my Vista box suffered with space issues (its a basic setup with 160gig drive and 2gig ram. I was working with ULead Movie Fatory and the drive lost 40gig after one coding. I believe Movie Factory cached part of the hard drive as a temp file during the encoding but didn't clear it out when it was done. I didn't find anywhere in the program to force it to delete the temp file, but after I ununstalled it and ran disk cleanup and got it back. Steve

08-11-2008, 05:54 PM

Rob Cannon Neophyte Join Date: Sep 2007 Posts: 6		WinDirStat http://windirstat.info/ It's free and works great on Vista.

08-11-2008, 05:59 PM

riley4077 Pupil Join Date: Apr 2005 Posts: 26		Give SequoiaView a try. Simple and free, best of all it gives a visual representation of where the file size is. The bigger the block the more space it takes up on your hard drive. http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderzoek/on.../sequoiaview//

08-11-2008, 06:01 PM

Paladin27 Ponderer Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 59		SpaceMonger is another program similiar to the one above. The old v1.4 is still free and works just fine even in Vista, plus no install required, just run the EXE. http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

08-11-2008, 07:29 PM

Civisi

Pupil

Join Date: Mar 2008

Posts: 18

Quote:

Originally Posted by Paladin27

SpaceMonger is another program similiar to the one above. The old v1.4 is still free and works just fine even in Vista, plus no install required, just run the EXE.

http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm/v1x.php

This one is my pick too.

My first thought is Vista's "Restore to previous version" feature. Each time you edit a photo, it's probably keep a previous version of it.

08-11-2008, 06:06 PM

Hooch Tan

Contributing Editor

Join Date: Feb 2002

Posts: 918

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rob Cannon

http://windirstat.info/

It's free and works great on Vista.

Argh. You beat me to it. For freeware, it's pretty much the best space visualization program out there. One thing I've noted when it starts coming down to disappearing space, I don't believe that windirstat properly reports File allocation space having it show up as (unknown).

If it's not visible, and System Restore isn't the culprit (being super hidden folders, afaik), the only other thing I can think of is the MFT for your drive. That is if you've stored a significant amount of files on your hard drive lately. Some defragmentation programs are able to correct this but I don't know of any free ones offhand that can do it.

08-11-2008, 06:20 PM

David Horn

Intellectual

Join Date: Jul 2003

Posts: 189

Fire off a search along the lines of

Quote:

*.* size:>100,000KB

You'll have to navigate to "Computer -> Hard Disk" for this to work. For some absolutely insane reason, Microsoft removed the direct link to the advanced search tool from the Start Menu. So now you have to start a search, wait for the results to trundle in, then "Search Pane" and then "Advanced Search" to simply get the same window.

Seriously considering moving to Mac, which is ironic since I suspect Microsoft removed the link purely to pander to Apple's lawyers.

#10

08-11-2008, 06:59 PM

Filip Norrgard Thinker Join Date: Mar 2004 Posts: 402		Windirstat that was mentioned already is a good start. It can be that shadow copies are taking up some space, but also system restores which you can clean up (all but the recent) using the system cleanup tool (under the More Options tab). Another possbility is that Windows-on-Windows is consuming space if you are running a lot of 32-bit programs in 64-bit Vista. But then the Windows directory should be visibly large... __________________ Filip Norrg�rd:: My blog @ filips.net

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