Okay, now I have just encountered something entirely weird. At the beginning of this week I had roughly 5 gbyte of free diskspace on my c: drive. A few days ago suddenly, this had gone down to 79 mb!! the strange thing about this is that I did not install ANY new programs at all, and I also did not download any files to my c: drive. In order to clear up some diskspace I uninstalled a few programs, bringing me back to roughly 1.5 gbyte of free space.
Ofcourse I was inquisitive as to why all this free space had mysteriously disappeared, so I made a search for any and all files added or changed during the past week. However, even the enitre amount of changed files on my c drive did not add up to even remotely fill the disappeared free diskspace! As a result I was still left completely unaware of where my precious gigabytes of diskspace went off to.
I ran a scandisc check, I rebooted my pc several times thinking maybe there was an error somewhere to make my pc space out. But nothing changed. Even today around lunchtime, all I had was 1.78 Gbyte of free diskspace.
Now just before typing this message I open my explorer and what do I see?? 4.15gbyte of free diskspace! And all I have done during this time frame between lunch and now is posting a message or two on forums. I haven't been doing anything else! ofcourse I am still missing about 2-2.5 gbyte of diskspace but I'm happy to have some of my previously lost space back non the less.
But all in all, the big question remains. What the hell was occupying all those gigabytes of storage and why was I not able to detect the files that were apparently there taking up this space?
Should I be worried that something on my system is seriously messed up?

A (maybe important?) sidenote to this whole story is that, even though my free diskspace seemed to disappear into nothingness, the total volume of my c disk has not been changing. It has steadily been at the 18.9 gbyte, which is the amount to which I had it formatted when I set up this system.

Message edited on: 05/22/2005 09:20

There are potentially a lot of temporary files generated including the windows memory swap file. If you suddenly loose space try using the disk cleanup utility, that will show some of the internet cache and temporary files. Also look at your swapfile. That can go up quickly and will reduce in size as the system purges unused space.

My swapfile was only 700 meg and I checked all my temporary directories, no extravagant amounts of data in there either. My temporary internet files dir didn't even score over 30mb. That's what I was so weirded out by it. The cleanup utility that comes with windows was not able to find much to clean up either.

Tons of temporary internet files, or one hell of a cookie, might do that.

Cookie is just a small text file, cannot take much space. Ray, what with your broken gigabyte downloads, there might be something somewhere on the C disk left of them. Have you checked Downloaded files? I believe they don't show up as "temporary" files, but I don't use Explorer, so I'm not certain. The size of the swap file depends on the needs of the system. you can put it at 700 MB, but if Windows need more, they will increase it, willy-nilly. And they can forget to return it to status quo ante belli when they finish. And the total volume of your disk cannot change unless the FAT (file allocation table) is whacked and then you also get lots of errors in files. What you've got, XP?

Ray, even though you think you have removed all Temporary Internet Files you might find this to be of some use. Everytime i clean mine out by using the normal IE/windows ways i then do a follow up clean out of them by opening an image viewer, i use ACDSee, i then go in and open every folder in Temorary Internet and clean out everything else that is still left in there. You'll be supprised on what gets left behind when you do a clean out the normal ways. You will also find sometimes with broken downloads they may go in your Temp folder or Temorary Internet folders and can only be removed the way i suggested. Stupid as that may sound but thats windows for you ;)

where would explorer store corrupted downloads? I've tried searching for really big files (100mb or more) but nothing was found except for the files I already knew of which were already there before (bryce scenefiles and such) yup, I know, windows can increase it, but in explorer it said it was 764mb, so I don't think it's larger then that. It's totally weird, I cannot figure out where all the storage is going. I'm already showing all hidden files, all system files. basically I've unhidden anything microsoft likes to hide from the average n00b (and I'm certainly no n00b anymore)

I had someting strange like this with XP. it turned out I loads of old restore points. I removed them all except the last good one and recovered about 15 gig!

woah damn that's a lotta data! I gotta check that one out phil! thanx for the suggestion! :D

hmm... where are these files located in xp? I thought it was in a dir called _restore in the root of the disc? it seems to not be there?

Rayraz,

To remove the old restore points from your computer

1. double-click the "My Computer" button
2. right-click your c: drive icon and click the Properties menu-item
3. click the "Disk Cleanup" button
4. click the "More Options" tab and the "Clean Up..." button under System Restore

This should remove all your old restore points from your computer.

FYI: Restore points are files on you hard drive but are hidden from view so the user does not accidently remove them.

-Chris

Message edited on: 05/22/2005 14:18

Start -> Programs -> Accessories -> System Tools -> System Restore -> Sytem Restore Settings. And you can turn Restore off, decrease the size used for restore points and so on. For particular points: My Computer -> right click Local Disk(C) -> Properties -> Disk Cleanup -> More Options -> Clean up (system restore) -> yes

Ha! A belated crosspost. I had this page open while I was looking for something else. :-)

Try defragmenting your drive. That can free up some space but not much.

Attached Link: www.grc.com

Attached Link: http://www.stevengould.org/

hmm my internet explorer does clear cash... maybe that was it? The system restore files must've been very little 'cause I was like clean up restore files and my hardisk was like "drr" and that was it :P

Do you have a firewall up? If not someone may have hacked your comp and is using it for storing files or running apps remotely. This happened to my husband, suddenly his comp would slow to a crawl and all kinds of things would pop up that he didn't install, etc.... I have never seen a IE cache take up that kind of space but then again I have WindowWasher and SpySweeper run everytime I leave the internet, so IE temp files and registry bits and pieces, uninstalled software odds and ends get cleaned up everyday.......

I have a firewall as well as spysweeper, spyguard and spyblaster and both Norton and AVG virusscanner. (norton sucks I don't trust it anymore)

All of this reeks of temp files, to me. Does Bryce run on this drive? I assume you're using XP... I hope things are running smoother, now...

bryce runs on another drive I think. it does reek of temp files, but the must be VERY well hidden then 'cause I was unable to find them.

There's a program you can download, if this happens again. It's called "Treesize Pro", and has a free (timed) demo version. It can find all your big files, and sorts everything in a large, easy-to-read graph (pie, or bar) on the right of an explorer-like tree. You can monitor and watch your swap and temp files with it, set it to alarm you if any files grow above a certain size (with exceptions, no less!) and it's pretty much an all-around amazing app for keeping things under control in this area. Give it a shot if something like this happens again, Rayraz.

thanx for the tip :)

my data's back! WOOT I'm not back at 7.8 gbyte! now that's more like it! I've got no idea where it has been hiding, but it's back! :D

Perhaps it's all those Jessica Alba pics?!?

You were possibly hacked. I've read about (and one time it happened to me) being hacked as an ftp server. They take over part of your drive and the directories are usually very nested and each folder has a period in front of it. My suggestion, install/run 1-2 antivirus and 2-3 anti-spyware a few times and scan the drives like crazy. I typically run norton antivirus, spybot, ad-aware & MS's free antispyware app. Norton costs, the others are free.

If you use Norton 2005, you won't need Adaware, Spybot, or any of that crap. Finally they did it right, Norton 2005 finds everything those other ones find, as well as finding viruses of course. I ran a recent scan on my main system, AFTER running AdAware, Spybot, and a couple of others. Norton 2005 found 1,907 adware/spyware trackers, and three previously unknown viruses. Amazing!

i have had a similar prob.found out why :9 a corrupt file had 'wiped out several gb of stuff in my poser folder (free stuff) :):p

Norton sucks monkeyass :| It SAYS it does updates automatically, then doesn't for months :| It boots forgetting to enable itself at times (even though I've set it to be enabled). Some upgrades make the whole system instable etc. But by far the worst experience I've had was that it left through multiple trojans and trojan downloaders without even warning me, then NOT finding them during full system scans either. And I did make sure before that full system scan that my virus definitions were up-to-date. I had to use FREE AVG virusscanner to find out there was a bunch of crap on my pc. My pc seems to have stopped randomly crashing, which has enabled me to release a whole arsenal of several virus scanners and spyware removers on my pc. nothing suspicious was found... guess it must've been a weird corrupt file or such

Were you using Norton 2005, Rayraz? Honestly, your problems sound as if you hadn't registered it at all. I have no problems with Norton 2005, it rules!

Mine's been good for the most part but now it is stuck saying it is current as of May 17. I think I'm downloading the same file I downloaded yesterday. Things are ok now. Nevermind. I have a scan scheduled for 2 am every morning and it does a pretty good job.