Where did all my free space go?

[StuartR]

One of my PCs seems to be running out of free space. It runs Windows 7 with Office 2013 and an assortment of other programs, but nothing that usually causes space problems.

When I first installed Windows it took up about 80GB of the 120 GB hard drive. This morning it got down to less than 300MB free space. I have managed to free up about 7GB by deinstalling non critical programmes and deleting temp files, but this is just a temporary holding measure. I've carried out many searches by modification data and file size, but not found where the missing 30+ GB has gone.

I do have weekly Acronis image backups going back a few weeks, so I could just wipe the disk and restore a backup, but there's no easy way to see how much free space there was when each backup was made! Alternatively I could cut my losses and just wipe the hard drive and reinstall everything from scratch.

Any suggestions?

[HansV]

Is system protection enabled? If so, what percentage of the hard disk is it allowed to fill?

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Have you tried a utility such as WizTree to see what takes up a lot of space?

[StuartR]

Thank you for these suggestions. System Restore is set to a max of 700MB.
I have downloaded WizTree, I'll install and run it soon.

I have just remembered that this computer has offline folders enabled to synchronise data from another PC that holds most of the shared data in the house. I'm off to see if one of the kids has stored something silly there...

[StuartR]

EVEN MORE WEIRD. I was investigating the issue, but I'm not aware of having deleted anything significant, and now there is more than 20GB free!

Strange

[StuartR]

I'm impressed with WizTree, it would have saved me quite a bit of time by showing that the \Windows\CSC folder is responsible for most of the used space - which might have reminded me about the offline files.

[HansV]

It's a neat little utility, and the price is right! I learned about it from Don Sadler, here in Eileen's Lounge: Wiz Tree.

[JoeP]

You might try running Disk Cleanup (Control Panel, search "disk cleanup") and use the Clean System Files button to cleanup old Windows patches.

Joe

[StuartR]

Thank you Joe, that recovered another 3.5 GB. I now have 26GB free out of 120GB, which is acceptable.