DawgTalkers.net Forums DawgTalk Tailgate Forum Hard drive help?

I found a bunch of temp files on my hard drive and got rid of them. I ended up with 60 gigs of free space.

That was last week. Now I notice I have 20 gigs of free space. I also looked at each folder on the hard drive they totaled 141 gigs.

I list the c: drive all together and it says 214 gigs are being used. How can I be missing 73 gigs?

Question 1; are you sure you have the view all system files and view all hiden folders options checked?

Question 2: did you recently install an app that maybe creating some error log
and eating up space on the HD?

As rabid said, there are many hidden folders, and individual folder sizes are not 100% accurate.

There as many reasons your HDD space may fill up quickly. again as rabid said, a log file that is not limited in size. I had an SQL log file on of my servers that grew out of control and crashed my server a couple times before I caught it.

One way to find it is do a file search by modified date, and leave the search criteria blank. This will list the most recent files to see a change then confirm what they are and why they may have changed, and in particular if one is very large.

Another cause that I haven't seen in a while but have in the past is a replicating virus. It essentially just keeps making copies of files on your drive to fill it up and cause it to crash. This usually happens pretty quick though, like over the a couple hours.

Also, check your temp folder restrictions, and your browser history purge durations, as they can help keep your system from filling up with unnecessary information.

I did find about 20 gigs of zip files I downloaded from the internet. Mostly large tutorial movies and program updates. Apparently anything you down load as a zip is stored. so I deleted all those that helped. I will continue my search.

Anything you download is stored until you remove it, and when you "extract" or "unzip" those folders they keep the zipped and unzipped versions on your drive, so you need to clean those up as well.

Yes it was the zipped folders I didnt know about. I need the unzipped / extracted tutorials.