Where did all of my hard drive space go??

Yesterday, I had 25 GB left on my C drive and 8 GB in the recycle bin. I ran CCleaner as I always do to delete my files. Much to my surprise, when it finished, I had only 1.24 GB left on the drive! I've been looking around and at first glance I can't tell where the new data is. Why would CCleaner have done that? Does anyone know where to look for the new data?

 

Windows system restore or if your machine is doing any automatic backups are good places to start looking.

 

No idea what happened...

It doesn't even make sense... to me..

DId you use a new version of CCleaner with the "wipe empty space" function??

You could try cleaning out restore points and shadow copies - but I doubt they are responsible, they don't suddenly occupy about 30GB... they grow slowly...

 

Well, I changed the restore file size to 7GB and got back about 13GB of space, so that wasn't the problem, though it's nice to have some breathing room. I think I'll email Piriform and see if they can help me out.

 

Ok, that maqy be an idea.

What version of CCleaner was it? Check if you have something to overwrite empty space - or to that extent...

 

try using drive cleaner in windows to delete restore points and shadow copies etc.. see if that helps. reboot after doing it

hmm sorry i saw someone suggested that already. i see you changed the size did you actually try to delete the old stuff? just a thought. also try running a defrag on the drive.

 

Why would a defrag recover disk space?

Gary

 

I just checked My Computer again, and it has my drive showing the expected free disk space. I don't know why it was so low for a while; I definitely wasn't looking at the wrong drive because I kept getting warning messages Windows saying that my free space was running low, and one of my games displayed the message that it could no longer play due to lack of free space.

I'm really confused, but I'm glad I have my disk space back.

 

i have seen a few cases where it in fact did fix a similar issue. it didnt recover the space but after it showed the proper amount. for some reason the drive was not reporting the space right. not at all sure why but i have seen it. and its worth a shot lol. though i always use perfectdisk with the free space option so that could have had something to do with it the more i think about it.

 

Not 30GB in one go.
Although it can occupy a few GB overal.