Solved Storage Space Rapidly Decreasing for no reason

[Humerus]

Today I noticed my storage space, last I recall being 20GB out of the 464GB, was hovering around 100kb and changing infrequently. I havent downloaded anything since Monday. I deleted 15 gigs worth of games and then ran malwarebytes. It found around 20-30 trojans and 120-130 pups. It deleted them all. I reboot the computer as prompted and see that the 15 gigs l freed up shrunk to 10.7 gigs. I looked around a bit more and found that it may have been system restore points, so I check mine and see that l have it disabled all together. As l typed this my free space decreased to 10.1GB. I looked around more and found out about a "W32/Rotinom Worm", on the net, though I assume malwarebytes would have taken care of it. It struck me, because I remember a few days ago I got a system message saying that "Rll.32 dl" or something like that, stopped working, but I dismissed it at the time thinking it was an emulator I was playing freaking out.

What should I do now?

 

[cyclops]

How are you managing your System Backups? Not restore Points. You may have a pile of back ups being stored. I just delete every other back up that is stored, except for the first one and the most recent 2 or 3, all the others can go. Today I deleted 100+gb of backups'

 

[Humerus]

As far as I know I have no system backups being made, but I'm unsure. The only thing I could find related to it is that it's scheduled for the first of every month and that it can't be completed due to not having a specific drive to save them to.

 

[cyclops]

Goto c drive, sort by size, find the big folder and see what it has in it. Not the windows folder, maybe one with the name of the computer. There are tutorials here for managing restore and backup settings.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/628-backup-user-system-files-delete-backups.html?filter[2]=Backup%20Restore

Many more tutorials in the tutorials forum thread

 

[Humerus]

I have no backups on the C drive, it was backed up to a usb I lost some time ago. Though it says the last back up was made on the first of this month. The backup size is marked as unavailable and the rive it was saved to, named (E is disconnected. The Manage Space option is grayed out.

 

[whs]

You seem to be an easy target for malware and a poor management of the backups does not help. I recommend you get proper malware protection (a firewall and a good AV program) and make frequent backups to a device that is disconnected when not needed.

 

[cyclops]

Give us a screenshot of your expanded C drive tree sorted by size. While you are at it please update your profile/System Specs following this tutorial, [FONT=&quot]System Specs[/FONT]

 

[Humerus]

Did you mean this?


I've been more than very careless on the internet, and I only run antivirus software every 2 weeks

 

[cyclops]

Yes that is what I meant. NEVER EVER GO ONTO THE INTERNET WITHOUT AN ANTI-VIRUS PROGRAM RUNNING, YOU MIGHT AS WELL BE RUNNING AROUND NAKED IN A JAIL HOUSE AND SCREAMING PLEASE RAPE ME. I strongly recommend you add a hard drive to your machine and get all of your game stuff off of your primary drive. Start there and come back when you get some house keeping done. The size of you restore points is a drop in a bucket compared to your other issues.
​

 

[Humerus]

I realize that I should, though hard drives are an expense that I myself can't afford for another few months. And I'd rather not toss out the, what I hope is, salvageable one I already have.
Aside from that, is there any other reason storage space steadily dwindles as time goes on?

 

[cyclops]

Inspect the size of every folder there on C drive by right clicking and viewing properties. Start a log of the folders by name, size and date. Check after a few days and see what is growing at the rate you describe. You need to do the leg work and narrow that down before I can even attempt to do much good.

 

[Humerus]

Okay, thank you. I actually wouldn't have thought to do that. I appreciate the help.

 

[cyclops]

You are welcome and I guess we'll see you soon.

 

[DavidE]

Use Wiztree and see where it shows your space is being used.
There is a portable zip download available, no install needed, unzip and run it.

Antibody Software - WizTree finds the files and folders using the most disk space on your hard drive

You can see what's in each folder by clicking on the + sign next to the folder.
You can save a screen print of Wiztree and later compare it to see what folders have a large change in space used.

 

[Humerus]

Thank you for linking me to Wiztree David
I had already found that the space used in C:\User\Cesar\, was increasing steadily over time, though I haven't checked the folders and docs there as of yet.
Wiztree did find several docs called C:\Windows\logs\CBS\CbsPersist_(a string of numbers each beginning with "2015") They each take roughly 3GB with one close to 4GBs
It also found 2 docs, I think. The icon is a page with what I think are gears on it, one called "C:\pagefile.sys" taking up 8GBs, and the other, "C:\hiberfil.sys" taking up 6GBs

 

[DavidE]

If you don't use hibernate you can disable it and that will delete the hiberfil.sys file.
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/819-hibernate-enable-disable.html

With 8 GB RAM you probably don't need a large pagefile so you could manually set the size.
Try 1000 MB minimum and 8000 MB maximum.
If you do have any issues you can always change it, or set it back to automatic.
Virtual Memory Paging File - Change

My CBS Logs folder is only 160 MB.
I don't know why yours is so large, maybe someone else that knows will post with advice.

 

[whs]

What is the size of this Skype file.

 

[Humerus]

Its actually just every skype profile picture I used in skype, I created the folder myself. It's about 35MB

 

[whs]

Its actually just every skype profile picture I used in skype, I created the folder myself. It's about 35MB

That is small. So that is not the culprit.

 

[sweetlivia]

It seems your system has been attacked by some malware. You can turn to dll suite for your lost dll, but maybe you still need some anti-malware tool.