When I turned my computer off last night, I had roughly 102GB free on my 1TB hard drive. When I turned my computer on tonight, I only had 85.1GB. Using Space Sniffer it found that I was supposedly using 715.3GB out of the 931GB available. Also when highlighting all of the folders on the drive and clicking on Properties the Size on disk is 715GB. This should mean I have 130.6GB free. Is there any way to get this space back apart from formatting the drive.
Missing 130GB of space?
- Thread starter haroldj97
- Start date
Solution
Solandri
Glorious
- Jan 4, 2012
- 4,919
- 98
- 43,290
Discrepancies between free space and total used space are almost always due to System Restore.
Control Panel -> System -> System Protection -> Configure
Look at the slider under Disk Space Usage. More than likely that's where most of your missing space has gone. Lower System Restore's usage to a value you're more comfortable with, like 3% (27GB) of a 1TB drive.
The other common culprit is the hibernate file and pagefile. But in general you shouldn't mess with these (you can disable hibernate, but Windows doesn't have an "official" method of doing so, and I've had problems in about 10% of systems where I disable it).
If you want to recover some space, run the disk cleanup utility. Windws key + E, highlight the C: drive, right click it, and select Properties. Next to the pie chart of your drive, there's a button called Disk Cleanup. Click it, then click OK to clean up temp and crash log files.
Do not click "clean up system files" unless you're critically short of disk space. That will delete the uninstall info for all the Windows updates you've installed. While that can save you several GB, if an update ends up making your system unstable, you will have no way to uninstall it and will need to reinstall Windows to fix it.
Control Panel -> System -> System Protection -> Configure
Look at the slider under Disk Space Usage. More than likely that's where most of your missing space has gone. Lower System Restore's usage to a value you're more comfortable with, like 3% (27GB) of a 1TB drive.
The other common culprit is the hibernate file and pagefile. But in general you shouldn't mess with these (you can disable hibernate, but Windows doesn't have an "official" method of doing so, and I've had problems in about 10% of systems where I disable it).
If you want to recover some space, run the disk cleanup utility. Windws key + E, highlight the C: drive, right click it, and select Properties. Next to the pie chart of your drive, there's a button called Disk Cleanup. Click it, then click OK to clean up temp and crash log files.
Do not click "clean up system files" unless you're critically short of disk space. That will delete the uninstall info for all the Windows updates you've installed. While that can save you several GB, if an update ends up making your system unstable, you will have no way to uninstall it and will need to reinstall Windows to fix it.
Thanks for your reply. I haven't done a system restore recently (only upgraded to Windows 8.1 in December 2014). Also the drive is not the system drive, it is used as my main storage drive where all my documents, games etc. are kept. When running disk cleanup on the drive, it only comes back with 430MB to be able to get back Would anything else be causing this missing space?
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