Question Can I track down how 14 GB of S.S.D. storage suddenly became free?

[Metallica93]

I have a 128 GB S.S.D. that had been running out of room. I reinstalled a game on it yesterday (~10 GB) and it Gwent back down to ~1B free, as expected.

Today, though, it has a not-insignificant ~14.9 GB free. Given how small this drive is, I'm a bit alarmed as I have no idea what the hell was removed/uninstalled. It couldn't have been temporary files as I ran Disk Cleanup 1-2 weeks ago and it found megabytes of data to clean up, not gigabytes.

How can I track down what I lost?

 

[DSzymborski]

You could always use something like Recuva and peruse the deleted files that it finds.

You're definitely headed for some fairly serious problems. 15 GB is basically the bare minimum of what you want free on a 128 GB SSD. Having only a GB free means you're heading for some kind of TRIM-related mess.

 

[Bob.B]

I have a 128 GB S.S.D. that had been running out of room. I reinstalled a game on it yesterday (~10 GB) and it Gwent back down to ~1B free, as expected.

Today, though, it has a not-insignificant ~14.9 GB free. Given how small this drive is, I'm a bit alarmed as I have no idea what the hell was removed/uninstalled. It couldn't have been temporary files as I ran Disk Cleanup 1-2 weeks ago and it found megabytes of data to clean up, not gigabytes.

How can I track down what I lost?

Perhaps the garbage collection system ran and cleaned out a bunch of junk.

 

[SkyNetRising]

How can I track down what I lost?

Check pagefile settings.
Could be:

some windows updates were installed,​

system rebooted and​

pagefile got cleared.​

Also possible:

System restore got turned off, because too little free space available.​