HDD Rapidly filling up - With what?
 

Using Windows 7Pro in a Dell Inspiron One, (monitor and inner workings all in one).


Happened to look at my C drive and noticed the indicator had gone from colour blue to red and it shows the C drive, 270GB, to be almost full, about 13GB spare, this has happened over the last month when I did a format and rebuild. I went through the files on the C drive, Windows is the biggest at about 23GB, Users at 15GB and Programme Files at 7GB, everything else is much smaller and I estimate I have used about 50GB. Am showing Hidden files, nothing obvious there. Would appreciate thoughts on what has happened and how to get out of it please.

What did you do to carry out the Format?

Run checkdisk first.

Check the system recovery in the Control Panel. If its auto-updating then it will be creating restore files.

Thanks everyone. It was system restore that was filling up the disk, I thought 'Restore' data was going to a different partition, but it wasn't! Thanks again.

writing lots of small files isn't efficient either as well as considerable fragmentation.

I find this a useful tool: TreeSize Free - Quickly Scan Directory Sizes and Find Space Hogs

Thanks, Mike. Must admit not searching too hard, but I've occasionally said to meself 'if only I still had Xtree'; 'twas tres useful. (how many years ago was that, frevens sake?)


loved the opening statement on their home page:
how true...

I had a copy of XTREE in 1986 so we're going back a fair way. XTREE Pro was great, XTREE Gold was pants.

Yep, I can vouch for that tool.

Although these days, if you're so inclined, you can probably replicate what it does just using PowerShell.

Fond memories of Xtree here too.

I use PowerDesk instead of Explorer. Occasionaly it reminds me I've used it Xthousand times (v5).

Bunch of boring old farts you lot. :E

Assuming you are running Win 7 SP1.
Click the Orb (Start button)
type cleanmgr.exe
Right click Run as administrator
Select C: Drive, OK
Scroll down (after the scan) and put a tick in the Service Pack Backup Files
Select any of the other options you may find that have lots of unwanted files.
The Service Pack Backup Files trims down the C: \Windows\winsxs folder that store the Windows Update Files. It also maintains a copy of any replaced Updated files that are no longer required by the operating system.

If you are not running Service Pack 1, then Google clean out winsxs windows 7 and then enjoy some interesting reading.

Anyway, it's worth a look.

Thanks for that - it only gave 1.14Gb but interesting - have done it with XP, before, but these sort of things are comparatively hidden in Win7.

how dare you call me boring!

Biggles,
go to the top of the class.
Exemplary description.

I'd forgotten all about disc clean up as I use CClean and Jet clean. However, disc clean found 5gb of m/s 's own crap from updates.

Me too....

Thanks Biggles