Thanks for that - Treesize confirms my suspicion it appears Acronis - my backup program has created heaps of temporary files that are hidden.
Now the problem is - how do I find them to get rid of them, and also to stop it continually happening, as it appears to be an ongoing issue?
I'll get back onto their forum - though I got absolutely no-where with my question previously, but now I can prove it is Acronis.
I think somebody posted this in #6.
Disk Cleanup : Extended
You could have a old Windows folder being saved. It can be removed using
Disk Cleanup : Extended if you decide you don't want to keep it.
Sorry, now I am confused - in post 6 you suggested I do an extended cleanup, which I did and replied to (post 8)
Are you saying I can use disk cleanup to find the files that treesize discovered, which I have identified as my Acronis backup program temp files? (see post 11)
When I run disk clean up, it does not show any of those hidden files - even extended, and they are not old windows files - so I am not sure what you mean?
Thanks
Using Windows Explorer search for unknown in computer and I think you will find them. I found mine that way but I only have 2.7 gigs.
Hi,
Searching for unknown did not show me where Acronis is hiding them. I've also tried searching using the names of some of the files, but that doesn't bring them up either.
I have just noticed I can delete from within Treesize - does any one who uses Treesize know if that is OK to do?
And secondly, how can I stop Acronis from continually doing this?
Properly unhook the harness to all drives except the one Windows is on and see if unknown is still the same size. I use a little program, Search Everything. So far it has never failed finding things. Careful how you use it when deleting if you do any deleting. When it deletes something it is gone for sure. Kind of like regedit.
The same type of thing happened to me. I started computer up in safe mode after seeing the 185gb unknown file. In safe mode I was able to locate the file in the temp folder under windows. It looks like and error happened with my install of office and created a streamserver file that was growing bigger and bigger. I deleted it and am going to see if it pops up again then find a way to fix it, maybe uninstall office and reinstall or if all else fails redo the entire system. I know it has been a year from the time this was started but thought I'd someone else like me comes looking for an answer this may help them.
I found a solution that may apply to your problems (it solved mine anyway).
I had this <unknown> directory listed in WinDirStat. TreeSize Free helped me understand it was files from System Volume Information files that were this big (50% of my hard drive space). Thanks for the tip btw, I found it on this thread.
So I went to Control Panel > System > System Protection
There, I clicked on Configure... and turned off System Protection.
Here you have two options: you can turn off System Protection as I did (you won't have a single recovery file anymore) OR choose less disk space usage.
Hope this helps :)
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