ItsGeekToMe.co
The official home of It's Geek to Me on the web!
Issue #307: June 9, 2013
Q: EVERY day the free space on my hard drive goes down by ABOUT 1.5 to 2.0 GB. I am not knowingly putting anything new on the drive. It seems to happen mainly overnight each day. Out of a 150 GB hard drive I have less than 30 GB remaining and it continues to decline every day for no APPARENT reason. I am a real novice on PCs. Do you have any ideas about what is causing this problem and how to fix it??
– Jim A.
Shalimar, Florida
A: Wow, Jim, I have to ask if you’re sure of your numbers, because a gigabyte is a LOT of storage space. For one to two gigs to be disappearing each day is amazing. Usually when drive space is “mysteriously” disappearing, it’s on the order of a few megabytes, which over time can add-up to gigs. When this happens, the first thing that I usually think of is Windows’ System Protection mechanism. This tool works behind the scenes to regularly save information about your computer’s settings, system files, and even data files you’ve modified. These changes are saved as Restore Points, which are created by default automatically every 7 days, immediately before certain significant system events (such as installing new software) or whenever you manually create one. While potentially helpful, this system protection mechanism also has the potential to eat-up your hard drive if it’s managed improperly. You can limit the amount of space it’s allowed to consume by going into the Control Panel and selecting System. Choose System protection, and look for the section that says “Disk Space Usage”. It should be set to be about 5% of the drive’s space. Jim, since you say you’re losing space every single day, it seems likely that this is not necessarily the solution for you. In researching your issue, I also read a case of someone running a program on a fairly regular basis to convert graphics files from one format to another. Unbeknownst to them, the program was creating a log file as it operated, and that log file had grown to an outrageous 74 gigabytes over time. Once they found the culprit, they were able to go into the program’s settings and tell it to stop logging, and the problem was solved.
Before you can find out how to fix the problem, you must first discover where the drive space is going. It can be next to impossible to traverse the many subdirectories on your hard drive, especially while you’re pulling up properties along the way to determine directory sizes. As an alternative check out the program WinDirStat, online at windirstat.info. This nice little tool will do all that hard work for you, and present you a graphical picture of your hard drive’s directory structure. Look over the results and check for any suspiciously large files. If nothing jumps off the page at you, repeat this once a day for several days, and see if you can see any files growing. As I said at the beginning, a gigabyte is a lot of space, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to find if you examine your drive’s contents over a span of time. After you find out where the free space is going you have a basis from which to formulate a fix. Feel free to write back with an update, or better yet, visit my website and post your results as a comment.
3 Responses to “Issue #307: June 9, 2013”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Like the writer in your June 9 column, my hard drive free space disappeared quickly and for no apparent reason. Today, I downloaded and ran WinDirStat. It shows that I have Google Earth using an astounding 88.8GB in C:\Users\Bud\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth.
The strange thing is that I uninstalled Google Earth a few months back. It was no longer shown under Programs and a Widows Explorer search for google showed nothing. I want to delete those 88.8 GB but got a message that “Deletion of system files or directories can seriously damage your system.” I’m thinking I won’t hurt anything by deleting these but decided to check with you before I did.
Not all programs delete their data when the application is deleted. While that might be useful for a program that processes pictures, or creates text documents, it’s a little annoying for something that displays map data, and that feels justified in allocating 88.8 gigs of your hard disk space! It shoud be a little better about cleaning up after itself.
It should be perfectly safe to delete that data, as long as you are careful to be certain that your deletion is limited to the GoogleEarth directory. Windows is probably only complaining about the deletion because the files are located below one of the special system directories (in this case, C:\Users\). If it makes you feel better, here’s a little trick to try: instead of simply deleting the directory, rename it instead (for example, change it to GoogleEarth_), then run your system for awhile to see if anything fails. Anything that tries to access the files will fail, because the specified path no longer exists. If everything continues to run, you can delete with confidence.
I’ve been having the same problem. I first did as you suggested and checked my “Disk Space Usage” and found that it was only set at about 5%. Which is fine.
Then I downloaded “WinDirStat” and had it check my system. But, while I found a handful of programs I had no need of, and uninstalled them, there was no large “smoking gun” like Google Earth.
I’ve also deleted a good many programs, and moved a truckload of files onto thumb drives. I’ve removed all photos and music, as they are big space eaters. But I’m still down to about 75 MBs, which means the computer can barely function.
Any suggestions?
One mysterious thing is that when I delete programs and files and I get my space back up to 2 or 3 gigs, by the end of the day I’m dangerously low again. Yesterday I uninstalled Thunderbird, Skype and a few other large programs (broke my heart) and got back up to about one 1.5 GB. Then I left for the day, but when I got home I was back down to about 50 MBs. And I hadn’t done anything. What am I doing wrong? What am I not trying?
Help…