something filled up my whole hard drive!

[mikee]

I went home from college for a few weeks leaving my computer here with it all locked up and turned off. Now that I have returned on sunday I go to use the computer and it said 6gb free and the bar was red. The free space steadily went down now I have no space what so ever on the c drive. I have run disk cleanup ccleaner and no improvement in space. Nothing of a size to cause this kind of impact has been downloaded. I did notice that the windows folder eats up 23gb now vs the 13 something I remember from a while back.


Any suggestions?

I have a paper due on monday and cannot do it on a computer with no space. Windows isn't even working right because of this.

By mikee286 at 2011-05-11

 

[JCB1]

download and run TreeSize JAM Software - Windows Freeware this will show you were all the large files / folders are. Post back here when you have found out what is taking up the space and you are not to sure if its safe to delete

 

[mikee]

ok WTF I just ran treescan like you said and did nothing other than that and now look


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now i have 15 gb What the heck lol. What could have caused that?

 

[iPwn]

http://www.computerforums.org/hardware/whats-eating-my-storage-space-103354.html#post1065969

Edit: Basically, this is your windows backups taking up the space and then being removed (space being free'd up) after a period of time. This is known as shadow storage and you can't just see it with Windows Explorer, even if you have "View hidden files and folders" enabled. Check out the post I linked, I'll try to find the thread I posted in that walks through how to remove shadow storage, but in the mean time, I believe that's the culprit here.

Edit2: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785461(WS.10).aspx

 

[mikee]

how do you turn off this shadow copy?