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Suddenly 400 GB of free space on C drive
I have a 1TB C drive (boot drive) that has been gradually filling up until I had less than 40 GB free. Today I checked the properties of C and saw that it suddenly has 444GB of free space!
I had been using WinDirStat periodically to see what was taking up the space. Until today, WinDirStat showed something called "Local Disk" with an empty extension (that is, just "." with nothing after the dot). LocalDisk was taking up 381.5 GB and was the largest single contributor to disk usage.
Today when I ran WinDirStat, it showed "Local Disk" taking only 7.0 GB.
All of my user data seems to be intact. WinDirStat shows the same sizes for photos, music files, etc. as it did before today.
Nothing special happened between yesterday and today. I did not reboot the system. The system did not crash. There were no Windows updates. I did not run any cleanup utilities or do any other kind of system maintenance. I didn't even "empty the trash." CrystalDiskInfo indicates that my C drive is in good health.
How do you explain the sudden appearance of 400 GB free space?