C drive filling up for no reason?

D

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Hey. I noticed lately that my C drive occasionally loses more and more space. I had 71.1 gb on my C drive, which is an SSD. I record large 4K videos to that drive and then move them to another. However, I notice that a few days later I'm now down to 64 gb and I don't understand why. I tried WinDirStat and I don't see anything that particularly catches my eye as something abnormal, so I'm not really sure what's up.

Any ideas? Maybe some temp files somewhere or something? I haven't been doing much other than recording videos and then moving them, and my Downloads folder, etc., are not on my C drive...
 
Caddy said:
Check:

C:\Users\USER NAME\AppData\Local\Temp

You should be able to delete anything in there.
Click to expand...

Ah-ha! That is the culprit! I had checked the temp folders before, but I didn't realize there was a temp folder within the Local folder as well. Turns out that is exactly what was filling up the "missing" space.

Thank you!
 
You can just run Disk Cleanup and it should take care of that and other useless files (like temporary files and logs) that get accumulated all over the place.
 
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If you have a NVIDIA graphics card another thing you can do is periodically delete the contents of your C:/NVIDIA folder (this is just the default location that files are extracted to during the installation of a new driver), but the driver is actually installed in "program files". Depending on how many times you've updated your drivers, there could be several gigs of unneeded files in there.
 
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wolfing said:
You can just run Disk Cleanup and it should take care of that and other useless files (like temporary files and logs) that get accumulated all over the place.
Click to expand...

Pretty sure I tried that but these particular temp files weren't recognized for some reason. A manual deletion worked fine, though, and WinDirStat is very useful to locate weird folders using too much space, etc.

daveyd said:
If you have a NVIDIA graphics card another thing you can do is periodically delete the contents of your C:/NVIDIA folder (this is just the default location that files are extracted to during the installation of a new driver), but the driver is actually installed in "program files". Depending on how many times you've updated your drivers, there could be several gigs of unneeded files in there.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I noticed that as well and went ahead and did that. Good tip, for sure, as there were several old driver downloads in there, and at the rate that Nvidia sends out new drivers that could really add up.
 
Fluent said:
Pretty sure I tried that but these particular temp files weren't recognized for some reason. A manual deletion worked fine, though, and WinDirStat is very useful to locate weird folders using too much space, etc.
Click to expand...

Make sure to click the button 'Clean up system files' though.
 
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Watch out too with installing any programs. There's a hidden "AppData" directory within you user directory where Windows installs the essential files. You may install your programs on another drive but Windows always always puts registered files there. And you want them there too - its part of how your programs run efficiently.

You can move them - like back when my SSD was 30gb's - but its very tricky.
 
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There are a LOT of temp directories now:
C:\Temp
C:\Windows\Temp
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\Local\Temp
C:\Users\{user}\AppData\LocalLow\Temp

Another thing that can really burn space is game saves. Those are also all over the place.
 
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