Losing Disk Space By The GBs

Others have written about this; I guess it's my turn now.

I have a 1TB hard drive. After installing W10 years ago and adding everything else, I had about 880 GB of free space. Over time, of course, that's gone down, but it eventually stabilized at about 870 GB. In the last few months, and particularly recently, I've lost space in multiple GBs. I could lose 5 GB in a day for no known reason. How much free space I have now depends of what source I look at. Windows says it's 839; CCleaner says it's 859. 859 would be great but not what it should be as far as I'm concerned.

I clean about once a week, using Windows Disk Cleanup, CCleaner, and other products. There's no Windows.Old. There's no huge list of log files anywhere that I know of. Any 'usual suspect' that you can think of probably doesn't apply. Also, every now and then Windows will clean itself, and I get back several GBs. Also, re-starting the machine will sometimes result in re-gained free space. Still, the drop has been dramatic. I don't use Storage Sense because it says it will clean when disk space is low. I'm not at that point and hopefully will never get to that point. I don't use the Windows File History feature. Right now there's only one restore point.

I've attached 4 screenshots. The first one shows everything with a non-zero amount of space. I know there are several software products that will analyze the content of a disk drive. Will any of them do a meaningfully better job than what CCleaner shows? Or have I given enough info that somebody can come with an answer already?

Turn off hibernation. That will save a little under 8GB.
Turn off system protection. That will gain almost 10GB.

You can also cleanup temporary setup files, Windows update files, temporary files, etc. by doing this:

Open an elevated command prompt and run this command:

cmd.exe /c cleanmgr /sageset:65535 & cleanmgr /sagerun:65535

This will open the Advanced Disk Clean-up app. Select every item on the list for best results, or uncheck anything you want to keep, and then click on OK.

You have over 800GB free on a 1000GB drive. What is the problem? Are you running out of space for some application? Not likely, I think.

I have a 500GB system C: drive with about 300GB free. I don't clean it. I don't worry about it. Windows 10 runs fine.

I think you are trying to make a non-problem a problem.

AK6DN:

It's astonishing to me that you don't clean your drive, but . . . whatever.

Concerning "the problem," if I'm losing multi-GBs at a time for no apparent good reason, that by definition is a problem. And if it continues, I could be at 0 GB free space one of these days. Would your response have been the same if I had lost 100s of billions of bytes instead of 10s of billions? The system images I create used to be 45 GB. Now they're 75-80. I don't have that much new stuff on my machine. What's it saving?

you could see if this reveals anything

Glary Disk Explorer | Glarysoft

vanp said:

AK6DN:

It's astonishing to me that you don't clean your drive, but . . . whatever.

Concerning "the problem," if I'm losing multi-GBs at a time for no apparent good reason, that by definition is a problem. And if it continues, I could be at 0 GB free space one of these days. Would your response have been the same if I had lost 100s of billions of bytes instead of 10s of billions? The system images I create used to be 45 GB. Now they're 75-80. I don't have that much new stuff on my machine. What's it saving?

Well, I do empty my Recycle Bin every now and then. Maybe once a week. But other than that I don't do any explicit storage management.





I have 128GB of memory on the system, so I don't have a virtual memory paging file (well, I do have the windows minimum of 800MB I think for crash dumps). I don't use hibernation either.

All my data files are stored on a separate data drive. Same for system backup images on a separate backup drive. I don't use windows restore/backup, I use Macrium.

I guess if I were concerned about disk usage I would go in and have windows purge temporary files, or enable windows storage management.

vanp said:

AK6DN:

It's astonishing to me that you don't clean your drive, but . . . whatever.

Concerning "the problem," if I'm losing multi-GBs at a time for no apparent good reason, that by definition is a problem. And if it continues, I could be at 0 GB free space one of these days. Would your response have been the same if I had lost 100s of billions of bytes instead of 10s of billions? The system images I create used to be 45 GB. Now they're 75-80. I don't have that much new stuff on my machine. What's it saving?

Actually, I believe that are very few people who are so on top of their disk monitoring . I'm not knocking you, just stating the facts. There is a certain amount of space that gets used by Windows. The space will not continue to get used up indefinitely. Certain things will only grow by so much before they get trimmed automatically. However, when you watch every byte, you end up trimming stuff that the system simply reclaims over and over.

I have machines that have been running for at least 5 years and I DO NOT have ongoing problems with more and more disk space getting used up. When Windows is new, some additional space gets used over time, but this stabilizes. But, if you keep micro managing it, it never gets to the point where it stabilizes.

NOTE: This is NOT true if you keep installing new apps, creating new documents, downloading files, etc.

I don't even micro manage systems with only 256GB of storage space to the level that you do and I was an Engineer doing absolutely nothing but data storage for over 12 years .

Even if it did continue to use more and more storage over time, you only need to do the management on a very infrequent basis. The end result will be the same and you will gain your space back.

Finally, Windows has mechanisms built-in that automatically kick-in to free up space if the system starts getting low on storage space.

One last time - there is nothing wrong with staying on top of the space being used as you are doing. I just don't want you to think that this is at all necessary when you have so much free space available.

I hope that this is in some small way helpful.

hsehestedt:

1. I know what my screenprint says about 'hibernation,' but I don't completely understand it. I don't know that I turned it on. If I turn it off, what happens/what do I lose? Also, where/how do I turn it off?

2. 'System Protection' sounds important. Is that nothing more than a restore point? I've used a restore point a grand total of one time, and it worked. Other than that I use Macrium Reflect to create system images, which I've had to use many times to overcome some kind of problem.

3. Concerning your 'clean' command, I ran it to the point of seeing what it produced. I guess it has in it all that Disk Cleanup has, plus some more stuff. Some of it I probably would be leery of checking since I'm not a computer person and don't understand some of that stuff, and some of it I wouldn't check because I don't check it in Disk Cleanup. If you're telling me nothing bad would happen if I delete those 'systemy' sounding things, I might be more adventurous. Also, why doesn't the Advanced function show the amount of space each item involves, like the normal cleaning function?

4. "Even if it did continue to use more and more storage over time, you only need to do the management on a very infrequent basis. The end result will be the same and you will gain your space back." I'm not getting the space back; that's the problem--it's getting worse.

5. "Finally, Windows has mechanisms built-in that automatically kick-in to free up space if the system starts getting low on storage space." Again, I've already experienced Windows cleaning itself even though I'm not (yet) low on space. And Windows (any process) should clean up after itself.

6. "you have so much free space available"--I wanna keep it that way, not watch it disappear.

Also, I've had the computer for 10 years next month, and W10 has been on it since summer of 2015. So if there's some 'timing' thing going on here, I don't know what that would be. And, again, I clean regularly, so normal stuff (garbage) is going away, but something else apparently is taking its place, and then some.

idgat:

I've already said that I have only 1 restore point. It may be 10 GB, but (1) there have always been restore points, and (2) those 10 GB wouldn't explain all the free space I've lost. Also, concerning system images, see my 2nd post.

AK6DN:

Where/what exactly is "windows storage management?" I've already mentioned Storage Sense. Is there something else I should look at? Also, concerning "purge temporary files," again, I use several cleaning processes, and that purging gets done.

SIW2:

As I researched on this website for this topic before posting myself, I saw references to lots of similar products. Is there something special about the Glary product, or it's just the one you happen use?

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Thanks to everybody who's responded so far, but I'm not sure we're getting to the root of the problem--constantly decreasing free space. I'm pretty sure my cleaning isn't causing that problem.

Could you expand on post 9,paragraph 2,the last line-"some kind of problem" which caused you to use Reflect numerous times?
Have you checked Reliability History for entries and if so,how are they categorised ?
Also have you tried -Task Manager >Startup - and disabled all non Windows programmes to see if a Third Party programme is causing the usage ?
IN Powershell [admin],type in---dism /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth ---and when finished,run ---sfc /scannow---and rerun it until a clean report is given.This will ensure your System files are functioning correctly.