Yet Another Cycling Forum

General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: velosam on 30 May, 2019, 08:31:30 pm

Title: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: velosam on 30 May, 2019, 08:31:30 pm

Apparently my C drive is 149gb.

I can account for roughly 80gb, where would the other 79gb have gone. Is there a disk clean up utility I can use to see where the space has gone?

thanks

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: Kim on 30 May, 2019, 08:36:42 pm

Yes, it's called "Disk Cleanup", and deals with OS-related cruft.

Someone with more Windows experience will be along in a minute to suggest some utilities for giving you an idea of what 'legitimate' files are taking up loads of space.

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: velosam on 30 May, 2019, 08:47:39 pm

just tried windirstat which said apple computer had around 60gb.  I suppose that is old backups of my phone. Can I simply delete these?

thanks

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: PaulF on 30 May, 2019, 10:31:25 pm

Yes, will probably be a mixture of backups and old iOS update packages

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: velosam on 31 May, 2019, 06:40:19 am

Thanks

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: T42 on 31 May, 2019, 09:40:10 am

Not to mention clustering.  80 Gb in data can occupy 160 Gb of disc if you have a lot of short files.  Although so-called short files are a lot longer these days so not as inefficient as they used to be.

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: caerau on 31 May, 2019, 10:20:46 am

Just a thought but I found a disk on a work computer once  (back in the early 2000s/possible late 90s) with a mysterious chunk of memory missing.  Turned out it had been compromised by a hacker and they were using it to store all sort of what I presume was porn.  The only way I could see what was taking up the space was by defragmenting the disk and some of the most fragmented files (which were otherwise invisible) were called things like '....Kylie gets hot..' and such  :jurek:
I reformatted the disk and removed it from the network as it just ran an instrument we used in our labs.


I would check firewall and antivirus scan it as a precaution.


(That was Birmingham University's genius security policy back then - every user for themselves - you were responsible for your own computer's online security - consequently I'm confident about half the campus was virus/trojan infested).

Title: Re: Where has my C drive gone
Post by: Mr Larrington on 31 May, 2019, 12:34:47 pm

Windows expands to fill the available disk space.  I swapped the 120 GB SSD on one of my boxes for a 500 GB one, which is now more than half full.  As Nvidia isn't updating the graphics drivers on that one any more then for once it isn't them.  One day I'll decruft it, right after learning Portuguese.