Hard Drive slowly losing free space available

[ZackRenner]

I began noticing my hard drive was filling up a lot more than I was installing things, but didn't think much of it until about a week ago when I was down to below 20% available. I have a 1TB hard drive and actually only have roughly 400GB of data on the drive, but it is saying I am at 195GB free. Where is the extra 300GB or so at on the PC? Also It will randomly decrease even when I am not using it. Last night before I went to bed I checked and was at 215GB free and left a virus scan on while i was sleeping. When I got up and checked again it was at 195GB and hadn't been touched since the previous night! Very confused on what the issue is and hope someone out there can help me with some ideas!

 

[scout_03]

do you have any king of back up software on also i would use ccleaner and malwarebytes to scan and clean .

 

[APassingMe]

Probably Restore points, you normally can't see the space that they use up. Check and see how much space you've allowed windows to use for restore points.

 

[APassingMe]

Wouldn't hurt to run chkdsk and defragment as well, sometimes it's an error in the index.

 

[ZackRenner]

Probably Restore points, you normally can't see the space that they use up. Check and see how much space you've allowed windows to use for restore points.

Wow it was system restore, for some reason it was set to allow 50% of my drive for system restore, just under 500gb. Crazy stuff but thank you so much!!

 

[ksyathish]

Click on Start Button>Control Panel>System and Security>Click on System>Click on System Protection>Select C: and Click on Configure>Reduce Max usage to 1% and Click OK. Thats it.
Now you can notice the C drive increased the empty space to 50%

Thanks
yathish