Space being misreported on C drive Windows 10

Pero_Bueno

Hi,
I noticed I was running low on my main drive (C) on Windows 10.
So I moved about 10GB of movies to another drive and now still only showing around 4GB free.

Before that though it was acting strange, reporting 200mb free ... 70 mb .... up down ... even went to 0 at one stage.

Disk is NTFS SSD.
Trash can is empty and movies were properly moved to other disk.

It was only after a restart that it's stabilized at 4GB of space free.

I'm wondering how 10GB of film was there 10 minutes ok ... checking the size of these films on the new location confirms I did not make a mistake with the size.


I'm thinking some sort of malware, Windows defender says I'm fine - but it's windows defender :rolleyes:.

I remember seeing on here a really good portable EXE for malware detection, can't find it now though ..

Dravokivich

When moving from one drive to another, the content remains in its original location. It only "moves" when you are switching locations on the same drive.

beauf

Perhaps some Windows temp files have expanded that were previously restricted due to not enough space. Maybe updates if you've not turned that off to share those.

That's very little space on a c drive. Use treesize or similar to see what is using the space. You might to get a bigger drive. What size is it in total.

BailMeOut

install and run TreeSize Free to see whats going on.

https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/download.shtml

wexie

Dravokivich wrote: »

When moving from one drive to another, the content remains in its original location. It only "moves" when you are switching locations on the same drive.

Are you sure you don't have that the wrong way around?

If so would you explain this please cause it's certainly not my understanding of how things work.

Alun

wexie wrote: »

Are you sure you don't have that the wrong way around?

If so would you explain this please cause it's certainly not my understanding of how things work.

No he's right. If you simply drag an item from one drive to another it is copied, whereas if you drag it to another folder on the same drive it is moved.

You can change this default behaviour in one of two ways. Hold ctrl down while dragging and it will always be copied, hold down shift and it will always be moved.

Alternatively, use the right mouse button instead of the left one and when you release it at it's destination it will prompt you for what you want to do.

BrokenArrows

I suspect that once you moved the files to the new drive something else used the newly free space. Possibly a windows update.

Alun

Run drive cleanup on the drive with the option to also clean up system files, especially old windows installations and updates. That will probably return a good bit of space to you.

wexie

Alun wrote: »

No he's right. If you simply drag an item from one drive to another it is copied, whereas if you drag it to another folder on the same drive it is moved.

You can change this default behaviour in one of two ways. Hold ctrl down while dragging and it will always be copied, hold down shift and it will always be moved.

Alternatively, use the right mouse button instead of the left one and when you release it at it's destination it will prompt you for what you want to do.

ah okay, I guess I got mixed up in the semantics there as I wouldn't consider that to be 'moving' but I get what he meant now.

ED E

Alun wrote: »

No he's right. If you simply drag an item from one drive to another it is copied, whereas if you drag it to another folder on the same drive it is moved.

You can change this default behaviour in one of two ways. Hold ctrl down while dragging and it will always be copied, hold down shift and it will always be moved.

Alternatively, use the right mouse button instead of the left one and when you release it at it's destination it will prompt you for what you want to do.

Yes, but he said move not copy. So Dravokivich is wrong.



Pero_Bueno your page file was likely constrained by your full drive, once space was cleared it could resume its proper size.

beauf

The problem is Microsoft uses Move and Copy interchangeably. When they are not the same thing.

One person is taking about how MS uses it the other how its meant in the real world.

People should really use a space monitoring tool like treesize or similar to see what bloat MS has sneaked on to your machine. The amount of crud they shovel on a machine these day would drive you to linux.

enniscorthy

hard drive defo on the way out mate

smuggler.ie

other places to check:
1. Shadow copies if enabled and/or modified(CMD as admin, vssadmin list shadowstorage). Default setting, if enabled, should be ~10% of disk size.
2. C:\hiberfil.sys - hidden system file that can/will be as big as RAM. Win10 has this "Fast startup" "feature" enabled by default. Even if you disable hibernation, file will stay. To purge - CMD as admin, powercfg -h off
3.temp and %temp% directories

enniscorthy

bin it

ED E

enniscorthy wrote: »

hard drive defo on the way out mate

enniscorthy wrote: »

bin it

Please stop talking rubbish.

Pero_Bueno

beauf wrote: »

Perhaps some Windows temp files have expanded that were previously restricted due to not enough space. Maybe updates if you've not turned that off to share those.

That's very little space on a c drive. Use treesize or similar to see what is using the space. You might to get a bigger drive. What size is it in total.

Thanks.
Yes too little space for a C drive, it's an SSD drive and was pretty expensive when I got it approx 2 years ago 128GB.
I wanted a fast C for quick windows boot up and working with photo RAW files - but of course space is limited, I have other external SSD drives that I do most of my RAW work on.
OK so I found a bunch of temp files using that Tree app (nice app thanks)
and have ~32GB free on C.

Fine for now.
But still, in theory I should have ~38GB !! there is still roughly 6GB missing.

Pero_Bueno

enniscorthy wrote: »

hard drive defo on the way out mate


bin it

ED E wrote: »

Please stop talking rubbish.

Yes please do.
It still loads windows 10 in about 2 seconds and RAW processing is about 20 times faster than a regular HD.

Still one of the best buys I have done on upgrading my PC , I'm not about to toss it in the trash!

Pero_Bueno

beauf wrote: »

The problem is Microsoft uses Move and Copy interchangeably. When they are not the same thing.

One person is taking about how MS uses it the other how its meant in the real world.

People should really use a space monitoring tool like treesize or similar to see what bloat MS has sneaked on to your machine. The amount of crud they shovel on a machine these day would drive you to linux.

Indeed, I use windows out of bad habit, I have started to use Linux Mint more and more on a VM - next step is to partition a drive and start using it proper, and then maybe dump windows.

Pero_Bueno

smuggler.ie wrote: »

other places to check:
1. Shadow copies if enabled and/or modified(CMD as admin, vssadmin list shadowstorage). Default setting, if enabled, should be ~10% of disk size.
2. C:\hiberfil.sys - hidden system file that can/will be as big as RAM. Win10 has this "Fast startup" "feature" enabled by default. Even if you disable hibernation, file will stay. To purge - CMD as admin, powercfg -h off
3.temp and %temp% directories

Interesting, this hiberfil.sys file is 7GB - but if I delete, will it slow down bootup ?

smuggler.ie

Pero_Bueno wrote: »

Interesting, this hiberfil.sys file is 7GB - but if I delete, will it slow down bootup ?

Your system is on SSD.
If you are "millisecond" sensitive man - then yes.
As you probably have read about it, you know that instead booting up from fresh, system loads hiberfil.sys file which in turn is all that was loaded to your RAM on last session. I guess your system has 8 GB RAM. Mine was 13.5GB as i have 16 GB RAM
If you feel "terrible" downside you always can re-enable fast startup and file will be automatically recreated for you.
Test it yourself.

Xterminator

Hi Op

Treesize free or windirstat are free tools that will show you what is using the space. knowledge is the key!
CCleaner will empty out temp files etc and free up a couple of GB if they have not been emptied in some time.

The small SSD's are a curse when it comes to managing your files.

beauf

Windows is as dumb as brick for filling itself up with temp files then falling over. Does it with updates. Downloads them even if it doesn't have enough disk space to do so, or install.

Pero_Bueno

smuggler.ie wrote: »

Your system is on SSD.
If you are "millisecond" sensitive man - then yes.
As you probably have read about it, you know that instead booting up from fresh, system loads hiberfil.sys file which in turn is all that was loaded to your RAM on last session. I guess your system has 8 GB RAM. Mine was 13.5GB as i have 16 GB RAM
If you feel "terrible" downside you always can re-enable fast startup and file will be automatically recreated for you.
Test it yourself.

I have 16GB of RAM...

OK I will give it a test...

smuggler.ie

Pero_Bueno wrote: »

I have 16GB of RAM...

Interesting...
From what i learned, default hyperfil.sys file size is 75% of your RAM and for 16GB RAM it match ~13.5GB . To my understanding, it could grow in case you hibernate while your system run RAM hungry tasks(virtualization, etc.), but will not exceed 100% off RAM as it uses compression.

I can only speculate here.
Might be Win10 change % is set, and it grow if heavy RAM usage. I'm running on Win8.1 and i use Hyper-V a lot(do you?) - RAM as high as 92-95% sometimes.

Was you RAM 8 GB originally when system was build and you upgraded RAM later? If confirmed, i might do some experiment to replicate, just out of curiosity.

There is way to manually adjust/reduce size of hyperfil.sys (this should be used with caution as it can cause errors) . Was it tempered by yourself or someone?

beauf

I turn it off. I never hibernate my systems even the laptops. They start so fast these days I don't need it.

smuggler.ie

beauf wrote: »

I turn it off. I never hibernate my systems even the laptops. They start so fast these days I don't need it.

I think on laptops it would be good-to-have. Isn't this what is used if your battery run low and you have important documents in editing...

beauf

I think if you ignore all the low battery messages and keep editing important documents risking corruption, then maybe you should change the way you work.

I think you mean it saves your PC as you left it. Open documents etc. Again I don't like to leave things like that. If you do then it good feature.

smuggler.ie

beauf wrote: »

I think if you ignore all the low battery messages and keep editing important documents risking corruption, then maybe you should change the way you work.

I think you mean it saves your PC as you left it. Open documents etc. Again I don't like to leave things like that. If you do then it good feature.

Your right here and I'm not using hibernation myself and in event off low battery warning do save work and seek for charger. This feature not apply to PC's unless on UPS - in event of power cut its to late.

Mentioned this here as precaution and just because:

"Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

Albert Einstein

don't know about you, but i have met plenty of whom ignore any warning(including low battery, or "server reboot take place on such day/hour - save your work and log out") and then calling with "lost my data!!"