Something is eating up my SSD space and I can see it filling up!

[Cloiu1]

So before I went to sleep last night, I had somewhere in the ballpark of 100GB free space on my C disk (232GB after OS). This morning I had exactly 0. I read some other threads about this problem, and tried some solutions but I couldn't find anything that fixed it.

The part which makes me think it's some kind of virus is that after clearing my recycling bin I went to check how much space I had left and I had cleared about 40GB, and as I refreshed the page I could see the space going down.

As I hit refresh over and over I had to watch as something filled up the entirety of my SSD without any other processes going on in the background (apart from steam installing one game to D drive). Got the warnings from windows saying I need to free up disk space, clicked on that and the largest thing I could get rid of was on the scale of MB...

I'm a bit lost of what to do! I've scanned it with Avira and Malwarebytes but nothing has come up...

Anyone had something like this before?

 

[D_Know_WD]

Hi there Cloiu1,

I believe that it would be a good start to adjust your system restore settings. You can delete all previous restore points. Also, you can reduce the space allocated for system restore: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482/make-system-restore-use-less-space-in-windows-7/

Here are some other things you can try in order to free up some space: http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/

If nothing helps, you can use some disk analyzing tool.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

 

[Cloiu1]

Hi there Cloiu1,

I believe that it would be a good start to adjust your system restore settings. You can delete all previous restore points. Also, you can reduce the space allocated for system restore: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/5482/make-system-restore-use-less-space-in-windows-7/

Here are some other things you can try in order to free up some space: http://www.howtogeek.com/125923/7-ways-to-free-up-hard-disk-space-on-windows/

If nothing helps, you can use some disk analyzing tool.

Hope this will help,
D_Know_WD

Hi,

Adjusting the system restore settings is part of what I'd tried before posting. However since posting a lot more relevant suggestions have come up! Using spacesniffer, in the time that I was sleeping up until this very second, there have been about 150gb of windows temp files made.

https://i.snag.gy/Wv5O7M.jpg all of those cab files apart from a very small amount have all been made in the last 9 hours!

(yes my sleep schedule is odd, I know)

Is it possible to find whatever is making all these? I'm not very knowledgeable with computers so sorry if this is a well known problem with an easy fix 🙁

 

[D_Know_WD]

Well, if we assume that this is not caused by some viruses/spyware, then I believe it could have something to do with updates.
Check this thread out: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/cabxxxx-files-found-in-windowstemp-folder/2e86137e-7e6b-4cb7-9a3c-4ee73f665742

D_Know_WD

 

[Cloiu1]

Well, if we assume that this is not caused by some viruses/spyware, then I believe it could have something to do with updates.
Check this thread out: http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-files/cabxxxx-files-found-in-windowstemp-folder/2e86137e-7e6b-4cb7-9a3c-4ee73f665742

D_Know_WD

The bit that helped was:

Solution was:
in <windows>\Logs\CBS folder delete the oldest .log file (you can also delete them all)
in <windows>\temp folder delete every cab_xxxx

And seems to have fixed everything for now, thank you!

 

[rgd1101]

MERGED QUESTION
Question from Cloiu1 : "SSD is losing space, and I can see it happening!"

Sitting here doing nothing but refreshing 'My Computer' I can see my C disk SSD being slowly filled up over time until there is nothing left. If I then delete something to make some more room it'll slowly fill up a few MB per second until there's exactly zero room left.

I've tried quite a few solutions posted on here for people complaining of not having enough disk space, but it just clears a few MB for each solution then those get eaten up...

Yesterday evening before I went to sleep I had about 100GB spare space...

Thank you for any help.

Have you turned off hibernation?

I wonder if something on the system is logging lots of events or errors, which are generating giant log files.

- look at the windows event logs for system and application to see if a lot of errors are being generated
- use windirstat to identify large files
- delete something to make space
- run it again and see if any of the huge files have grown larger

I've seen cases where issues of some sort result it huge log files being generated.

If you are unsure of which huge files can be safely removed, you can file names here.

Have you recently installed any new software or patches?