C drive space disappearing

I tried WinDirStat and Treesize with the suggested boxes checked/unchecked and they gave sizes for C drive that were within 1GB of the results I got the first time. I also tried Command Prompt again as an administrator, both typing and copy-pasting vssadmin list shadowstorage, and got the same answer, "unexpected error with the deliverer/editor of situation drafts" (translation from Finnish into English).

My security program is F-Secure, I use it to scan the computer for viruses every month and it's active. I also have Windows Defender; since it came with the computer I've been wary of removing it.

I don't use any cleanup programs, unless cleanmgr counts (I started using it a couple of months ago when I first tried to look up solutions to the disk space problem).

I screwed up sfc /scannow at first by exiting the Command Prompt window. The scan may have been running in the background despite that because when I tried Command Prompt again it said that another maintenance action was ongoing and I had to wait. After a while, I used sfc /verifyonly and it was able to start. It found no integrity violations, but because of my mistake I can't tell whether it's because scannow fixed them or because there were none in the first place.

I'll try scannow next and look at posts 4&7 again.

I assume the restore points are on C drive and hibernation exists if those are the defaults, but I've never used them

Yesterday I started having a new problem which might be completely unrelated to the disk space since I've often had less free space than now, but I'm mentioning it just in case. The preview images of different files are constantly reloading or not appearing at all; it's most common with image files likes jpegs, but sometimes happens with everything in the folder or in different folders at the same time: instead of the default browser logo for html, notepad for txt etc, I just see white space with the file name underneath and I have to change folders repeatedly until the proper view comes back. Even My Computer, which only has the drive information, sometimes has the bar on top filling up slowly like it's an image folder searching for a lot of thumbnails and only shows white space until the search is done.


The bar on top that I'm talking about, looking as it should.



The bar filling up as the computer searches for information: this now happens all the time, even in My Computer and folders I just visited. Sometimes it doesn't even start the search, just shows file names and white space, until I go to a different folder and back.


Example of an image folder when it works and when it shows nothing.

Is this something that a restore point could fix?

Were you able to resolve this?

I had a similar problem with my SSD. I upgrade from a 128GB to a 256GB.. and had roughly 175GB free..
A few months later my drive is in the red. With no reason for it. I cleared the hibernation file and manually set the paging file which gave me back about 30GB.
The next day 15GB had disappeared again.

I check the drive properties and it said it was only using about 80GB..
WinDirStat also confirmed that the usage was only around 80GB.

After playing around and looking around i found that the problem was with the Windows Search indexing file, that was located in
c:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Search\Data\Applications\Windows

Someone suggested running the WinDirStat as administrator, which I did and it finally showed that the indexing file "Windows.edb" was the culprit.

Rebuilding the search index solved the problem and recovered 150GB of space.

To rebuild the search index in Windows 8.1 search for "Indexing options" and click on Advanced. Under the troubleshooting section, click rebuild.

Within 5 seconds of clicking rebuild, all my space had returned.

Hope that helps someone!