hard drive missing space and continually losing more.

So I've known for a while (since I got it) that my laptop has been missing more hard drive space than it should. Generally this number has been around 30 gb so I've ignored it as it hasn't affected anything. Recently though I've been having performance issues akin to low disk space. apparently i had less than 10 gb of memory left out of my 226 gb hard drive. I deleted a lot of old videos, downloads, photos, and the such that I didnt need anymore and brought it to just under 30 gb available. That was yesterday. Today I'm doing some more work on it and find I'm now near 25 gb. I think I have near 100 gb missing space that I can't account for anywhere. I have run SpaceSniffer and it finds 99.1 total gb used on the drive. My hard drive is 0% fragmented. I ran an avast boot scan and found no viruses or the such. Also using the free disk space tool I could only recover 1.7 gb when I delete everything it has to offer.

I know that I've only tried some of the more basic things but I can't find anything that could possibly be eating up so much of hard drive. What causes most concern to me is whatever it is also suddenly was able to claim an additional 5 gb seemingly overnight.

On a possibly related note I have had an issue where my computer spontaneously shuts down without any warning. When I mean spontaneously I mean it's there one second and gone the next. This has happened twice in the past month but never before.

Any help is greatly appreciated!

TreeSize Free - Quickly Scan Directory Sizes and Find Space Hogs

Download and run Tree Size Free from the above link. It should tell you what's occupying the space. It's usually reliable, but Windows can be secretive.

The usual suspects would be an unusual amount of space devoted to System Restore or a runaway program of some type that's doing stuff on the sly.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

The above command will tell you how much space is devoted to and used by System Restore.


You can save space by reducing or eliminating the hibernation file if you don't use hibernation.

You can alter the size of the page file.

You should do a virus and malware scan.

Take a look at the appdata folder, most likely located at C:\Users\your user name whatever it is\appdata. It can grow wildly at times.

Offhand, I'd guess the shutdown issue is unrelated.

I ran tree size and it shows the hard drive is 208.3 gb with 105.4 gb used.

Running "vssadmin list shadowstorage" tells me that I need to have administrator permissions. I am and always have been the sole user on this laptop and I have always had admin privileges so I don't understand why it keeps denying me

I've done virus and malware scans already, everything from quick to the whole system boot scan and it has come back with nothing

AppData shows at 3.8 gb though it's hidden and I can only see that from what TreeSize tells me.

You need to use an administrator's command prompt.

Start button/accessories/command prompt; right click it and choose "run as administrator"; then enter your command.

Windows indexing can also use run wild and use up a lot of space.

Post a screen shot of Tree Size Free results if possible.

Sorry, that was a stupid mistake of mine not to remember to run as admin.

Here are the results of TreeSize and the cmd prompt. I think I'm seeing some suspiciously familiar numbers in the prompt though





Edit: fixed image size issue

Sorry about the small images. fixed the sizes so they're readable now.

C drive space disappearing

Look at post 17 in the above link for a possible issue with Windows indexing taking up lots of space.

blackace936 said:

Sorry, that was a stupid mistake of mine not to remember to run as admin.

Here are the results of TreeSize and the cmd prompt. I think I'm seeing some suspiciously familiar numbers in the prompt though





Edit: fixed image size issue

You've got 105 GB used by System Restore.

You can delete all but the most recent restore point; or all of them;

Then set maximum allowed to maybe 10 GB and keep your eye on it.