Number Of Files

[seekermeister]

I've always wondered exactly what is considered a file, but never dwelt on it, as far as those within the OS volume. However, I noticed while defragging the volume containing my movie collection, it states that there are 5,331 files, but the only things in that volume are 1,028 movies, which are 1 file each. Why does the defragger see so many more?

 

[boohbah]

is it possible its counting hidden files and the actual folders ,if each movie is in a folder then thats an extra 1028 files plus if you have a cover or poster they are files ,and if you are using mediabrowser and have backdrops then each of those will add to the file count.

 

[Anthony]

Are they not hidden files which are needed to play the file? Just guessing here....

 

[boohbah]

if you click the properties of the movie folder containing the 1028 movies it will tell you the folder size and the number of files and then the number of folders

 

[seekermeister]

if you click the properties of the movie folder containing the 1028 movies it will tell you the folder size and the number of files and then the number of folders

Good tip, but most of the extra files has nothing to do with the movies, they are in $RECYCLE.BIN. It contains 3,089 files, and 915 folders. I really don't understand the difference between $RECYCLE.BIN and the Recycle bin, because I emptied the bin and those files remain. What purpose does that serve? Does it's contents really occupy as much space as real files do?

 

[boohbah]

are they on an exernal Hd, if so check the size of the space remaining and then check the properties of the external and see if the numbers match.
the next step would be to use ccleaner to clean the drive, that will clean out the $recycle. bin
also this software will check your drive and show what is using up the space

 

[niemiro]

if you click the properties of the movie folder containing the 1028 movies it will tell you the folder size and the number of files and then the number of folders

Good tip, but most of the extra files has nothing to do with the movies, they are in $RECYCLE.BIN. It contains 3,089 files, and 915 folders. I really don't understand the difference between $RECYCLE.BIN and the Recycle bin, because I emptied the bin and those files remain. What purpose does that serve? Does it's contents really occupy as much space as real files do?

Hello!

$RECYCLE.BIN contains a recycle bin for every user on the computer. Have you emptied all Recycle Bins?

In fact, your Desktop Recycle Bin is just a shortcut to a special folder in $RECYCLE.BIN. The format is:

Hidden $RECYCLE.BIN folder, containing folders with a name of the SID of each user on the computer, containing a Desktop.ini file such as the one below to give this SID named folder special Recycle Bin properties:

[.ShellClassInfo]
CLSID={645FF040-5081-101B-9F08-00AA002F954E}
LocalizedResourceName=@%SystemRoot%\system32\shell32.dll,-8964

Thanks!

Richard

 

[seekermeister]

There is only one user on this computer...me, so if I empty the recycle bin on the desktop, shouldn't that empty everything? I ran a defrag to arrange files by name, and the first 4,916,935 clusters are used by $RECYCLE.BIN. If there are 8 bytes of data per cluster, then that would equal 39,335,480 bytes. I'm not sure what that equals in GBs, because the number that I arrived at on the calculator was too large, but regardless, it's a lot of wasted space. I looked at $RECYCLE.BIN, and it contained two files with long numerical names, one of which had a padlock on it. What would happen if I tried to delete both of those?

EDIT: Make that two users....me, the administrator and me, the user.

 

[seekermeister]

I just took a random sample by clicking on a number of the blocks on the defragger, and every one that I opened were to the file in $RECYCLE.BIN that I assume belongs to my current account, because the other one has a padlock on it, which I also assume belongs to my other account. Therefore, even though my desktop recycle bin is empty on this account, the $RECYCLE.BIN shows many files in it, some of which has no relationship to anything that this drive/volume is now being used for.

I'm assuming that each since each volume has it's own $RECYCLE.BIN, it would not contain files from other volumes...would it?

 

[alphanumeric]

A lot of folders have a hidden thumbs.db and desktop.ini file in them. 1,028 movies even if they are only one file could end up being 3084 files counting those hidden ones. Another 1 or 2 system files in each folder and the total gets big real fast. Running disk cleanup before you defrag could help to speed things up.

 

[seekermeister]

That may be true, but I have the system set to show hidden files. Thumb.db and desktop.ini files should show within the file manager...they don't. It appears to me that the issue is the files contained within $RECYCLE.BIN, because their number approximates the number of extra files, plus I have verified that they are actually occupying space on the volume. With the average movie taking ~3blocks on the defragger, I have estimated that the space taken by $RECYCLE.BIN is equal to ~27 movies. I don't think that running a disk cleanup or running ccleaner with eliminate those files. I just opened Disk Cleanup, and the only thing that it offered to clean was the Recycle Bin, but that contains nothing.

EDIT: The curious thing is, that I formatted the entire drive into one partition when I started using this drive for this purpose, yet during the defrag, while it was going through $RECYCLE.BIN, I saw music files that were never stored within this volume. I can't remember whether they were on this drive before the formatting or not.

 

[Anthony]

When you delete a file off a computer it doesn't actually delete it per say. Maybe this is what your seeing.?

 

[seekermeister]

I understand that deleted files do remain on the hard drive, until they are overwritten, but after being deleted and being emptied from the recycle bin, the OS and defragger no longer sees them, so that can't account for the issue.

EDIT: Even if the $RECYCLE.BIN is seeing deleted files, I can see no point for that being so, because the OS is unable to recover those files. It requires specialized recovery software to do that, by reading directly from the hard drive, not by any record kept by the OS.

 

[seekermeister]

I wasn't certain what would happen, but I crossed my fingers and deleted the files in $RECYCLE.BIN, and as far as I can tell, everything is still working properly on that volume. Now, I only have 1,739 files and additional 35GBs of space.

 

[boohbah]

Good news ,my next post was to link you to my thread about this very problem.

 

[seekermeister]

Thanks, but that would have been better news if it had arrived before I fixed the problem. I couldn't use ccleaner, as you did, because $RECYCLE.BIN wasn't visible in it, only recycle bin, which was empty. I got rid of the files by right clicking the two numerical files within $RECYCLE.BIN and selecting Delete. The file that appeared to be for another account disappeared, and the file for this account remained, but an activity window appeared indicating progress at deleting the contents of the file.