SSD space being eaten...

[Petherwin]

Hey all,

I'm in a slight quandry concerning the space being taken up on my 128gb SSD - I currently have about 1gb left free !

I use it as my windows 7 boot drive + a couple of games installed only. Puzzled as to why my SSD states only c.1gb left free I went searching and found this folder containing a staggering 49.3gb lurking -

C:\Users\Home\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows - this is NOT the win7 installation folder (installed in the path C:\Windows)

When I open this 49.3gb folder, even with the View set to show all hidden files and folders, the few folders/files that are shown only add up to a few megabytes - nowhere near the 49.3 gigabytes stated. Clearly something extremely large is being hidden from me (and yes I am set as admin).

My virus scan shows up clean and Google doesn't present any obvious answers.

Any ideas what this folder might be and why it is taking up almost half of my SSD capacity? I'm tempted to take refresh my system image backup, delete this "offending" file and if it all goes tits up just restore from the backup, but thought I'd check with you guys first. And anyway, without knowing what is going it could just start all over again.

As a footnote, a week or so ago I noticed my SSD was getting pretty full so I actually uninstalled a game freeing up c.10gb - and now the SSD is more full than ever.

Curiouser and curiouser...

[Shamble]

You could give http://sourceforge.net/projects/windirstat/ a try. There may be system files in that directory which are hidden from explorer, which this tool can see. This will produce a size-ranked tree of all of the files on your disk. Given that you are using an SSD, it should be able to do this pretty quickly. Just on the off-chance have you upgraded your operating system, to Professional or Ultimate for example, at any point from within Windows? Let us know how you get on.

[chuckskull]

Shamble has already put you on the right path, but a quick point you have remembered to show "Protected OS files and folders" not just hidden ones? It's 2 separate options.

[shaithis]

It's probably temporary internet files. Clear them in IE and then limit the amount of space it can eat.

[kalniel]

It's probably temporary internet files. Clear them in IE and then limit the amount of space it can eat.

Even better is to right click the drive->properties and click the 'disk cleanup' button - this will check what temporary files, not just internet ones, can be deleted, eg old windows update backups etc.

Other space eaters are hibernation files - disabling that can free up a chunk, especially if you have a lot of RAM.

[squirrelz]

Also try SequoiaView

It's a great graphical utility for showing you where the space is being used. Always amazed at how much space is used by Windows that you can't get back.

[kalniel]

Also try SequoiaView

It's a great graphical utility for showing you where the space is being used. Always amazed at how much space is used by Windows that you can't get back.

Same thing as windirstat mentioned above, but good to have alternatives incase one goes down/starts charging

[jim]

Again, I'm just duplicating advice here, but TreeSize Free is a really nice bit of software, very simple and effective.

I had a cleanout a few days ago, and there were all sorts of bits in folders I wouldn't have expected to be there - saved a huge number of GBs through spring cleaning.

[Petherwin]

Excellent advice, thank you all. My SSD is now back to 55gb free !

I found the following:
1) I don't use IE however I did open it and delete temp internet files just in case. This freed up a few mb only.
2) I performed a disk clean up. I do this fairly regularly anyway so only a few mb freed again.
3) I set folder options to view all hidden OS files as well. Apart from a couple of small system files in the offending folder, nothing else showed up.

4) Here's the big one. I ran WinDirStat as shamble suggested. This program revealed further hidden folders within the path described above that had remained hidden. Inside these folders were a huge number of avi files which were clearly eating my SSD space. I deleted them all and my SSD is now c.50gb slimmer. There are lots more files hidden as well, but they only amount to a few mb so I've left them alone in case they are system files.

I run a lot of video conversion and encoding functions, and these avi files are clearly some sort of residue left over from that (I recognise file names). Quite how the files are getting there remains a mystery for now as I use other folders and drives for the encodes, so I'll look into that myself.

Thanks again all !