Win 10 lying about folder sizes?

Why is this pile of garbage called Win10 shows some folders as being smaller than they actually are, like five times smaller? For example Windows folder on my computer when right clicked, shows in properties as being 5GB, when in reality it is 28 GB. Winsxs alone is 9GB and yes I know about linked or whatever it's called folders. And how can my SSD's used space increase by 1 GB in couple hours of sitting idle? I'm the only user/administrator of this computer and I killed all the MS spying tasks I could find. Anyway I can get my computer to work properly and show actual folder/file sizes without using third party software?
Also what is Aria, why is it creating multiple, 0kb log files and how do I kill it?

 

What build are you on? Launch command prompt as admin and type winver then post your build number

I am on Redstone 5 1809 with the latest updates Build 17763.168 and I just checked 3 folders and they are displaying the correct size:

 

I'm on 1803 XXXX.411, which shows as the latest for 1803. Update doesn't show 1809 as available for me yet. How do you know your folder size is correct? I added all the folder sizes plus restore plus swap and page file and was getting about 42 GB total, but my C: used 82GB, since I was missing half of my drive, I started looking more and when Winsxs alone came out to be over 9GB, inside 5 GB Win folder, I knew this is nonsense, so I downloaded FolderSize program. That showed 72GB total when started normally and full 82GB when started as ADM. But there is no way I'll be using third party program just to see folder size. My computer came preloaded from HP, so those idiotic permissions may be screw up, but even then having access is one thing, not showing up at all is another and if I can see Winsxs as 9GB, I should see more than 5GB Windows folder. This Win 10 is such a train wreck, it blows my mind.

 

Permissions might be it. If you are not allowed to access a folder, then you should not be able to determine how many or big files there are.
I usually encounter this with client computers and their Users folder, those that I cannot access show as 0 size.

 

Could be partially, but as I already said, I can see Winsxs as 9GB folder, but Windows folder, which holds Winsxs shows as 5GB total, so something else is messed up.
The main reason I never embraced tablets and stick to computers is that I got totally sick and tired of breaking into my own devices and here we are. So how do I first fix permissions for home computer, single user with full access? I don't think I can find all the drivers for win7 for this coffee lake laptop.

 

I think W10 applied compaction to compress everything since you ran out of space.
I'd run dism++ with all options ticked in main screen and it might clear off most windows 10 garbage blocking your update to v1809.

 

Plenty of space available and any compressed folders show up in different color, but I may have to run dism anyhow, because there are some hash errors on media wav files and when I run sfc, it tells me hash files on backup are messed up as well, so can't fix it ???????, but I think no one at MS does have any idea what they're doing and this being monopoly, no one gives damn as long as they make money on advert and spying.

 

So I run DISM with /checkhealth, /scanhealth and /restorehealth and all shows good, but of course when I run SFC /scannow in typical MS nonsense I get message that ResourceProtection found some files are corrupted, but can't be fixed. Log file lists some .wav files in Windows/media folder. Any suggestions?

 

This is Dism++.
Those wav files mean that some A/V files was deleted which was needed for Winsat performance index aka WEI score.

 

Thanks.
The .wav files listed as errors are all there, match the byte counts etc. seems the permissions were messed up for some reason, so I decided to manually download 1809 and update. It went surprisingly smooth, took only 20 min (last time I updated my computers to 1803 one took 6 hours, another 10 hours) and no more errors of any kind. So I'm still in kind of shock, as I was expecting to let it run overnight. Now I need to fix missing folder size, still when i add up all folders, I come up short, but not as much as before and I also checked my other win10 computer, also numbers don't add up, I'll figure it out. BTW my Win7 computer shows all folder sizes properly and when I add all up, it comes within margin of error, so it's something Win10 specific.

 

To answer my own question, there seems to be bug reintroduced in version 1803, still not fixed in 1809, making folders properties/size unreliable. Sad state of affairs, when such a basic OS function like folder size can't be relied on. Also can have dangerous consequences, if you delete folder showing empty, that may have important files in it.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...t-folder/933ade81-55e1-4cd5-a4b1-614044fab64e
Now if you follow this in typically MS backwards complicated fashion, you'll get proper folder size.
https://www.addictivetips.com/windows-tips/view-storage-usage-by-folder-in-windows-10/
But still missing any detail for some files, for example under category other, I have detail for 1.20 GB and still missing any explanation for another 12GB
Thanks MS for another WTF moment.

 

About a week ago, I wanted to copy a folder, I right click directory and it said it was around 11gb and i was copying it to an 16gb flash drive but i kept getting the message that their was not enough space, I looked into the directory and found a sub folder that was 6gb and the rest of the directory was 11gb so that`s like 17gb space i would need, But windows was saying the directory was only 11gb.

John.

 

Yep, before major update I tried to save some important folders to my recovery partition, just in case, it kept telling me not enough space and I couldn't understand why until I realized the folder size is understated by x2. I remember something that this is not the first time and that it was fixed before, but can't remember the details now.