Hi guys and kaj, I am experiencing exactly the same problem. Something is consuming my hard drive space as soon as I freed up some space. For example, I just freed up 10GB 2 hours ago, and now 2.5GB has been filled. This happened within the last 2 hours and the computer was not even being used at all.
This is happening for the past week and driving me crazy. Any help is much appreciated.
Ryeu,
Download, install, run and then post a screen capture image of C: using WinDirStat.
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics
Regards,
Golden
Hi Golden, thanks for your reply. Following your instructions, attached is an image of C drive.
I noticed that there is 315.4GB in Windows Temp folder, so i drilled down a bit more, and found a bunch of files taking up so much space, shown in the second image.
What are these? I used Disk Cleanup this morning but guess these could not be not wiped out by the cleanup.
Could you please let me know how to safely clean these without any damage to other components, and how to stop this from happening?
Am using Windows 7 x64.
Thanks in advance. Really desperate here.
Hi,
You use FireFox correct? The etilqs files are temporary database files used by Firefox (etilqs = sqlite spelled backwards) and are usually purged when you close FireFox.
Delete them manually after you have closed all instances of FireFox. I'll need to do more research to find out why they aren't being purged automatically.
Regards,
Golden
Yes, I use Firefox. I will delete these etliqs files manually.
Looking forward to your research.
Thanks.
Check your Firefox settings. If you can find the bad setting, reset to defaults or uninstall and reinstall the latest version saving only your Favorites exported/reimported as an HTML file.
I uninstalled Firefox as suggested. Without reinstalling it, I want to monitor the free space see if this would do the trick. After uninstalling it, I had 28GB free space. 2 hours after, I am at 26.6GB, 1.4GB filled up without doing absolutely anything with the laptop.... Strange.....
Just an update on my situation, which was the original report on this problem. I haven't ever had a re-occurrence since my restore from my acronis backup. But I never got to the bottom of it.
Sorry, took me longer than expected to do this. I just wanted to make sure I got a good case to show. Below are what I have done and the results. This is a bit long, so please bare with me.
- I ended up with 26GB free space last night after uninstalling Firefox (no reinstalling after that). I used my laptop for couple of hours this morning and lost another 4GB free space to 22.1GB. I did not save or install anything during this time period, just plain web surfing.
- so, 22.1GB free space was the starting point where this exercise began. I also restarted whenever I ran the WinDirStat.
- At 4:43PM, I ran WinDirStat - screen shots attached with *443PM_* in file names
- At 6:24PM, I ran another WnDirStat - screen shots attached with *624PM_* in the file names
- results - another 1.6GB data was used between start and end time, now down to 20.5GB, while "Windows/Temp/<Files>" folder increased by the same GB.
- I tried to figure out which file size increased, but apparently the increase was as a result of increases and decreases in size of many files within this folder, including etilqs files.
I have also attached a screen shot on my analysis...
Let me know if I don't explain properly or anything else I can do. Thanks.
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