100GB Disappeared Overnight??

Hi All,


Hopefully someone can help me explain what has happened on my PC.

Ok so my everyday drive is a 500GB Sata, for the past 6-12 months it has averaged to have about 250GB free space. Just recently i did a massive clean of surplus files, games and programs. Along with a disk cleanup, disk scan and defrag.

I ended up with about 340GB spare, then within a day or two it has done down to 240GB

I havent installed anything since the clean up or had any OS / Program updates but i dont know where all that space went??

Does anyone have any idea?





Edit -


To the Mods if you happen to read this post. In the computer forum header there is a double ''and'' -

Computer Help: Post your computer problems and and get help from our experienced members.

reply to post by Havick007


Try defragmenting your hard drive.

Other than that, your hard disk may be failing.

You name it... Many reasons for this to occur.
One being a virus has corrupted your fat and thus now reports a lower HDD amount.

Do a search for *.* on your computer created in the last 24 hours.

Maybe a tmp dump has been created when you did the check disk.

If so, go through all your files and ensure everything that is important is still readable and working.
If so, delete the tmp dump.

Is your computer making backups?

Or is the system restore application running in the background and set to a large size.

reply to post by Sovaka


No luck, i couldnt find any temp dump.

Although i think i may have found the cause, i was just reading on some other forums, when i did the clean up i removed all but the most recent system restore point.

Could it be that since then more restore points have been created and taken up so much space?

reply to post by dreamfox1


Yeah i just added that into the reply above. When i did the clean up i removed all the restore points except for the most recent.

Vista creates a restore point but i think Mcafee duplicates it as well, could that cause such a loss of space?

Possible.

Windows also creates multiple restore points as well... Just in case the new restore point is corrupted or creates unwanted errors.

I think AntiVirus software would make their own backups.

You should be able to specify how much data you wish to use for recovery.

Did you move anything to a partition?

Check your partition, maybe files got shifted to there.



*My computer crashed last week. I feel your pain bro.

reply to post by Exuberant1


ahh, dont say that and jinx me . I dont think it's about to crash...i hope.

No partition changes as far as i know.

reply to post by Sovaka


Yeah after doing abit more reading in various places i think that might be the cause.

Sorry all, perhaps i should have been more diligent before wasting thread space....

But thanks to everyone for their feedback and tips

reply to post by Havick007



Windows allocates virtual memory poorly, for Windows does not use a swap partition. There is a little program I use on computers called Optimizer XP. It is free, and works quite well on all Windows platforms, even Windows 7.

There is a cool little program called WinDirStat that will show you whats eating up ur drive space. Its free and works great. Hope that helps.

WinDirStat

Silver

I think by deleting your files, you moved them to system restore.

Try disabling and then enabling system restore.