For the past two weeks I have been watching my hard-drive storage dwindle away, and I'm not uploading any photos, video, music or programs....every day it has been less and less....I have checked for a virus with several programs and nothing shows up....I used the hard-drive clean up program that came with the computer ( HP) and it did free up a little space--but, that was gone in several days. What is eating up my hard-drive? I am running 64 bit Vista.
There are some tool to analyse disk usage. On Linux I use Baobab which make some pretty pie charts on disk usage. You can find some equivalent to this program in this place : //alternativeto.net/software/baobab/?platform=windows but I don't know which one you could use. Just try the first one ;)
Windirstat seems to be the tool you need for analysing your disk : //windirstat.info/
Something I found using up quite a lot of space and that is added to every day are the "system restore" files. I now use Piriform CCleaner tools to erase many of these (but never the most recent one, and not the one created just before I made a major update, at least for a while so I can go back if I encounter problems.
What kind of space are we talking about here... what's the total capacity of the drive, and what is the remaining capacity? Do you have just one drive for the OS and you data, or are the drives separate? If separate, which one is experiencing the problem?
There was 921 gb on the hard-drive, and now 1.36 gb left. I've run various virus programs including spy-bot and malware...they find nothing. I did have a trojan on my computer about 2 months ago, and it did hide all my files, etc....took care of that problem...found all files, etc...and, it has been clean since. No new programs on it...I have not loaded up any photos, videos, music, etc..in the past few weeks....I don't know how much of the 921 gb I had actually used for photos, etc....may have been a lot...I was under the impression I still must of had lots of memory yet ( very few raw files)....I am sure video ate up a lot of my hard-drive....looked at the space left on the drive about 2 weeks ago, and was shocked to see it so low...then kept looking every day and was losing about 50 to 30 gb per day without uploading anything...until I am now at 1.36 gb! Everything was on one drive C....Oh, and I have already removed the system restore points because I read that having many of those can eat up storage too...did not seem to help much.
There was 921 gb on the hard-drive, and now 1.36 gb left. I've run various virus programs including spy-bot and malware...they find nothing. I did have a trojan on my computer about 2 months ago, and it did hide all my files, etc....took care of that problem...found all files, etc...and, it has been clean since. No new programs on it...I have not loaded up any photos, videos, music, etc..in the past few weeks....I don't know how much of the 921 gb I had actually used for photos, etc....may have been a lot...I was under the impression I still must of had lots of memory yet ( very few raw files)....I am sure video ate up a lot of my hard-drive....looked at the space left on the drive about 2 weeks ago, and was shocked to see it so low...then kept looking every day and was losing about 50 to 30 gb per day without uploading anything...until I am now at 1.36 gb! Everything was on one drive C....Oh, and I have already removed the system restore points because I read that having many of those can eat up storage too...did not seem to help much.
30 to 50 GB/*day* ??!! Yikes! Sounds like you do need to analyze what's taking up the space. I'd agree with looking for newly-created files. You can do that just by opening an explorer window to the root folder on the drive and either hitting CTRL-F in WinXP to bring up the search pane, or in Win7 (and Vista?) just click in the search box at upper left of the window, click on "Date Modified" and select a date range.
Something I found using up quite a lot of space and that is added to every day are the "system restore" files. I now use Piriform CCleaner tools to erase many of these (but never the most recent one, and not the one created just before I made a major update, at least for a while so I can go back if I encounter problems.
May be worth checking out...
what OS?
on windows 7, actually it may have been Vista, i had an issue. basically windows system restore was taking up huge amounts of space. i had to dig into the system to tell it to to only use what i want it to or else it took free reign over the free space on the C drive, we are talking 10-20 gb lost.
Something I found using up quite a lot of space and that is added to every day are the "system restore" files. I now use Piriform CCleaner tools to erase many of these (but never the most recent one, and not the one created just before I made a major update, at least for a while so I can go back if I encounter problems.
May be worth checking out...
what OS?
on windows 7, actually it may have been Vista, i had an issue. basically windows system restore was taking up huge amounts of space. i had to dig into the system to tell it to to only use what i want it to or else it took free reign over the free space on the C drive, we are talking 10-20 gb lost.
If you were asking me what my OS is (not the OP's), it's Vista (SP 2).
Here is the link to CCleaner CCleaner for anyone who is interested, and yes, the default for how much space is allocated for the restore system files is sometimes set as a % of the total hard drive, and can end up being a lot of gb.
Oh my gosh!! I ran all the programs everyone suggested....found what was taking up the space. I unloaded a lot of files and folders of photos and videos to an external hard-drive today and I did free up 250 gb. I was so proud of myself and felt like I had a handle on the situation....3 hours ago I had 250 gb of storage on my 1 tb hard-drive...now three hours later I am suddenly down to 184gb!! I am so disgusted and I don't know what is happening.
Oh my gosh!! I ran all the programs everyone suggested....found what was taking up the space. I unloaded a lot of files and folders of photos and videos to an external hard-drive today and I did free up 250 gb. I was so proud of myself and felt like I had a handle on the situation....3 hours ago I had 250 gb of storage on my 1 tb hard-drive...now three hours later I am suddenly down to 184gb!! I am so disgusted and I don't know what is happening.
That is just too strange. Obviously something is writing huge amounts of data out there. That's over 6MB per second, every second, for three hours. Something's not right. Re-run one of the suggested tools to see where the extra space is being eaten.
ETA: Really silly question, but the thing isn't set to automatically be capturing video to disk, say from a TV tuner, is it??
Oh my gosh!! I ran all the programs everyone suggested....found what was taking up the space. I unloaded a lot of files and folders of photos and videos to an external hard-drive today and I did free up 250 gb. I was so proud of myself and felt like I had a handle on the situation....3 hours ago I had 250 gb of storage on my 1 tb hard-drive...now three hours later I am suddenly down to 184gb!! I am so disgusted and I don't know what is happening.
Yes, I ran the windirstat program and it showed my photos and videos made up the largest part of my hardrive, and that is basically what I took off today and put on an external hard-drive.
Hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, click on Processes.
Then, click on CPU and sort so that the processes are listed from high to low. If there is something actively writing to your drive, it should have high CPU usage.
Now, it may very well be that at the moment nothing is running with high usage.
Click View, Select Column, then make sure the following items are checked:
CPU Time
I/O Write Bytes
Sort by each. You'll be able to figure out the process writing a lot of data. Now, don't jump to any conclusions right away. This accounts for every I/O write operation, including network data. So, you basically want to compare CPU time and IO to help get an idea. Post a screen shot here of the highest sorted operations...
How do I get a screen shot? I will do what you suggest.
To capture the active application window, hold down ALT and press PrtScn (usually to the right of the function keys). Then paste it into your photo editing program.
Can you post the image to your profile and link it? The resolution is too low to see.
Remember, 3 shots:
1) Sort by CPU (you have memory sorted below)
2) CPU Time
3) IO Write Bytes
Can you post the image to your profile and link it? The resolution is too low to see.
Remember, 3 shots:
1) Sort by CPU (you have memory sorted below)
2) CPU Time
3) IO Write Bytes
Full size image here. Better to post a clickable thumb, easier to get to the image page.
