810GB of 2TB external drive accounted for, where's the 1.2TB?

[Gadgety]

I've got an external drive. It seems to have been filling up without my adding much stuff during spring. It's a 2TB drive, and using two file explorers (ExplorerXP and another one) they both showed 810GB of files folders. So that's 1.2TB of data which I could not account for.

I installed and ran WinDirStat. It identified 1TB of files labelled "unknown". However, WinDirStat still showed these files as *.WBCAT files, which were supposedly back ups for my C:/ drive.

The C:/Drive is only a 250GB drive, but I figured perhaps it's multiple back ups, all saved without being replaced.

In the first run of the WinDirStat I could identify these files, and oddly it said the last update was in the year 2097. In addition almost all *WBCAT files had been created on one day back in April.

Next I got an error message saying WinDirStat possibly was installed incorrectly. I didn't heed the warning because it's late at night and I figured I could address this later. Instead I ran WinDirStat again. It still shows the uknown files, but the second time it was impossible to get any read out (as in when those *.WBCAT files were created).

What would be a good next step? Remove and reinstall WinDirStat and run it again? Use CC cleaner? Run some virus check (I do it regularly, and I have had some Trojans, but supposedly my PC should be clean from them now.

 

[marsmimar]

Try posting a screen shot of your Disk Management (expanded view) while the external 2TB is plugged in. Perhaps Disk Management will give a clue where the missing 1.2GB are.

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/274797-disk-management-post-screen-capture-image.html

 

[CKWD]

Hello Gadgety!

Is the whole 2TB of the drive full? Can you also post a screenshot of the Properties of the drive, where it says how much free and occupied space there is?

What kind of data do you have on the drive, do you have any programs installed, a portable OS, do you load anything from it?

You could try turning on the option to see hidden files and check that as well.

Post back!

CK_WD

 

[Gadgety]

I found the source of the problem, just the other day. The 1 TB unreadable section is Microsoft's system and file security back ups. The odd thing is I've chosen the option to "Keep only the latest system image and minimize space used by back up." Looking into the files there back ups saved went a long while back.

 

[marsmimar]

Glad to hear you found the problem. Thanks for posting back.