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How did I suddenly gain 160 gigs of hard drive space

angminas

angminas

Diamond Member
Went from 29 gigs free to 190 on a 1TB WD Black that I've had for like three years. Windows 8.1, fully manually patched. Recently mostly defragged with Defraggler. I noticed the difference after some of the latest Windows updates and after reinstalling Avast with Advanced System Care. I didn't run its cleaner yet, and I don't know where I was hiding that much bad data anyway. I looked with RidNacs and didn't notice anything different, though I hadn't been watching the numbers or anything. All the big data users (Steam, Amazon Unbox, Music, Videos, Blizzard) were still there. The computer did run a self-repair around that time when it didn't start up properly once.

Ideas?
 
Losing space is something to worry about. Gaining space? Not so much.

But if I were to guess, the space is the result of Advanaced SystemCare. From the product description page:
As your computer gets older, it will run slower and slower because of some unwanted programs, lots of useless files generated by Windows, and registry errors. With its newly added Speed Up module, Advanced SystemCare 9 will not only clean up the junk files to free up more disk space, help you deeply optimizing and defragging the registry, and completely remove all the useless applications, but also troubleshoot all the other problems slowing down your PC, to ensure you a cleaner & faster PC. ​​Go for it! Advanced SystemCare is more than just a free registry cleaner.
Click to expand...
 
I'd check that nothing stupid has happened, for example that 'system restore' has been disabled (or perhaps just cleared out).

160GB is a lot of data for some 'cleanup' program to have got rid of. I might expect to find a few GB in the user's temp folder. Any malfunctioning browser could rack up a few GB of temporary internet files (pretty rare these days IME). Major candidates can be found by running Windows's Disk Cleanup Wizard, for example if a Windows installation has been in place for a good few years, Windows Update files can be cleaned up to regain maybe 10GB space at best, or say the Windows 10 upgrade files (whether it's cached setup files or backup files left behind by a Win10 upgrade). I'd be surprised if I could rack up 40GB of unnecessary data at the most through this approach, even if I went around deleting every cache regardless of whether it is being properly managed or not.

Once I found a manifest file on a Vista machine (in winsxs iirc) that had reached 30GB in size when it should normally be a few megs in size.

In theory if a machine once had a runaway memory usage scenario, it could inflate the size of the pagefile (ie. pagefile.sys) to an absurd size, but I've never seen it happen.

A few more gigs could be freed up by doing stupid things like disabling the pagefile or hibernate image.

It would be interesting to find out whether 'Advanced SystemCare' (usually one of those products I expect to be installed on a customer's computer without their permission) has a log of what it has done, perhaps some answers can be found there?

Clearing out iDevice backups from iTunes can reclaim a lot of space (e.g. >10GB), but it would be bad if a cleanup program started doing things like this without a fair number of 'are you sure' prompts.

Windows 8.1 - did you start with Windows 8.0? An interesting thing I found on a computer recently (my guess it was from when the machine was running Win8 RTM), was that something like 12GB of files were found in a cache folder that is used by 'live tiles'.
 
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I've run a lot of cleanups on a lot of computers over a great number of years, and I've never seen a temp file cleanup free up quite that much before. The only thing that I can think of that may cause that is when Windows crashes, it dumps everything that's in RAM to the hard drive. So if you have a lot of RAM, you'll suddenly find that your HDD is fuller by the amount of RAM x the number of crashes. At some point, through temp file cleanup, those memory dumps could be deleted, resulting in large gains of space at once, as described.
 
Nashemon said:
I've run a lot of cleanups on a lot of computers over a great number of years, and I've never seen a temp file cleanup free up quite that much before. The only thing that I can think of that may cause that is when Windows crashes, it dumps everything that's in RAM to the hard drive. So if you have a lot of RAM, you'll suddenly find that your HDD is fuller by the amount of RAM x the number of crashes. At some point, through temp file cleanup, those memory dumps could be deleted, resulting in large gains of space at once, as described.
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The default setting is minidumps these days though, isn't it?

- edit - I just checked mine, there was a single file (memory.dmp in windows folder), about 0.75GB.
 
mikeymikec said:
I'd check that nothing stupid has happened

160GB is a lot of data for some 'cleanup' program to have got rid of.

In theory if a machine once had a runaway memory usage scenario, it could inflate the size of the pagefile (ie. pagefile.sys) to an absurd size, but I've never seen it happen.
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Just FYI, the pagefille CANNOT grow larger than 4x the size of RAM. Interesting fact. Yes, I've tried it personally.
Windows 8.1 - did you start with Windows 8.0?
Click to expand...

Interesting point. If the PC was upgraded at any point, there could have been a "Windows.old" directory with the entire old Windows install, still sitting on the drive. Though, I would hope any "cleaner" program would at the very least, prompt the user before deleting such a thing.
 
Do you have more information about what the "self-repair" you mentioned does, specifically? I'm not using Win8.1, so maybe it's just something new, but I've never heard of that. And since you say you haven't actually invoked the "cleaning" functionality of Avast, one would think (or hope, at least), that it wasn't that program that just helpfully "decided" to clean your system including the deletion of such a massive amount of data without so much as mentioning it...

In addition to a possible windows.old directory, though, is it conceivable that you'd amassed an unusually large number of restore points and/or temp files that somehow got deleted (again, it seems to me a Bad Thing for any program to delete anything [by default] but its own installation files willy-nilly without prompting the user, but who knows?)
 
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I'm wondering if "self-repair" process involved a CHKDSK, and it deleted some stuff, like a movie or three or something like that.
 
VirtualLarry said:
I'm wondering if "self-repair" process involved a CHKDSK, and it deleted some stuff, like a movie or three or something like that.
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Yeah, I see I didn't, but I meant to suggest that the OP randomly check some of his media/game files to make sure they're "really" all there in their entirety...
 
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