My hard disk drive has less memory than before

[028florian]

I have a hitachi 1 tb (931 gb) external hard drive, and before a month I had 70 gb free, and now I have only 58, and I didn't put any games or movies on it.
I also selected all the files on the hard drive and it said it were 851 gb, which should mean that I have 80 gb of free space, and by the way I have had selected the hidden ones also.

So what could the problem be?

 

[ahnilated]

Math.

 

[nukemaster]

I would guess system restore and shadow copies of files.

Even selecting all files including hidden will not show space taken by some OS folders. Those folders are not user accessible and this do not report size.

You can use the build in disk cleanup feature to remove most of the system restore points and shadow copies to see how much space is recovered.

Hit start and search for Disk Cleanup(select a drive if needed) then select Clean up system files form the disk cleanup window and use the More Options tab to clean up System Restore and Shadow Copies.

Hope this helps.

You can also limit how much space windows takes for Shadow Copies and System Restore. By default it is a percentage of the drive so the larger the drive, the more space it wants to take.

Hit start and type Advanced and select View Advanced System Settings. From the new Window select the System Protection tab. Select your drive and hit Configure. You can not adjust the slider to take more or less space. More space gives you more restore points and shadow copies, while less saves space at the cost of overall number of restore points. Pick whatever works best for you.

 

[028florian]

Thanks, but it didn't help
I did that and the cleanup lasted for like 0.5 seconds and the free space was still the same

 

[Hawkeye22]

Check your pagefile size and if you don't use hibernation, disable it so that it deletes the hiberfil.sys file. If you still have an issue, try windirstat (free download). It will show a graphical representation of your drive/files and you'll be able to see the large ones easily.