My HDD has more space left than my OS thinks it has.

vald0069

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Mar 25, 2015
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Well I'll start off by saying that I recently (couple of days ago) cleaned my HDD from stuff I didn't use and freed about 300 gb from my maximum of ~1TB. But then a couple of days after I looked at my hdd again and it had 150 gb less free space, and again a couple of days more it had 100 gb less. I'm Completely certain that I've not acquired 250+ gb withing a couple of days, and I can confirm this by looking at my internet usage.

I was wondering why my hdd kept losing free space, so i booted up space sniffer and let it run for a little while. When it was done I saw that only 334 gb was used on my hdd while windows is saying 699 gb is used. I concluded that the number windows has given me is completely garbage.

A side note is my hdd is quite old, but I doubt it has anything to do with this problem.
 
Solution
This is almost always caused by system restore. Your system restore files are not visible to most disk scanning software, but Windows is aware of it.

Control panel -> system -> system protection -> configure

On many systems, system restore defaults to using up to 50% of the disk. Under disk space usage, move the slider down to a more sane value like 10 GB.
Is it maybe possible that space sniffer is just wrong, or maybe not counting various system files like recycle bin, restore image files, etc.? Microsoft wrote your operating system so I would assume they know more about it than anyone, plus they have been writing software for....a long time. I'm not familiar with space sniffer but it appears to be some type of freeware downloaded off the internet. In the face of a discrepancy between the two, I know who I would trust.
 
This is almost always caused by system restore. Your system restore files are not visible to most disk scanning software, but Windows is aware of it.

Control panel -> system -> system protection -> configure

On many systems, system restore defaults to using up to 50% of the disk. Under disk space usage, move the slider down to a more sane value like 10 GB.
 
Solution


Current Usage under system restoration.

Thank you sir, that is definitely what has been bothering me.