Windows Seven Install - Drive losing space

[kidicarus]

Hi,

I've had Seven installed for a about 6 months, two days ago I got a message saying I was running low on hard drive space, so I have allocated another 10 gig from my other partition, but I'm sill somehow losing space, with the pc idle, not downloading, if I go to the list of drives and refresh I can see the space going down, yesterday I had 9 GB free, its now gone down to 7, so can anyone explain where its going? I have turned off system restore and protection so I dont think its that, anyhelp would be appreciated.
Thanks

 

[richc46]

The space is being used by shadow copies. If you turn off your system restore and then turn it back you lose those copies (so make one right away so you have at least one point to use if needed). It is also being taken by system image, the copies of your hard drive.

To be sure take a anti virus scan and download and use malwarebytes.
http://www.malwarebytes.org/mbam.php

 

[kidicarus]

The space is being used by shadow copies. If you turn off your system restore and then turn it back you lose those copies (so make one right away so you have at least one point to use if needed). It is also being taken by system image, the copies of your hard drive.

To be sure take a anti virus scan and download and use malwarebytes.
Malwarebytes' Anti-Malware: Malwarebytes

So how can I stop the services from using my drive space? I dont have any data on my Seven drive as i'm using as an OS drive and not data, so i'm not concerned about having a backup, I can if necessary just do a re-install.

 

[richc46]

You can keep system restore turned off, but then you lose that feature if you have a problem. If you do turn it off make sure that you back up everything and have an OS system image on an external hard drive.

 

[TimStitt]

Hi,

I've had Seven installed for a about 6 months, two days ago I got a message saying I was running low on hard drive space, so I have allocated another 10 gig from my other partition, but I'm sill somehow losing space, with the pc idle, not downloading, if I go to the list of drives and refresh I can see the space going down, yesterday I had 9 GB free, its now gone down to 7, so can anyone explain where its going? I have turned off system restore and protection so I dont think its that, anyhelp would be appreciated.
Thanks

Hi kidicarus and welcome to the forums,

Have you turned on any logging recently, such as antivirus or network logging? Outside of the shadow copies that richc46 mentioned, log files swamping your disk space can occur.

Another culprit maybe any drive clearing programs that you might have installed and scheduled. I'm talking about the sort that wipe all free space back to zero or random letters.

I've attached a little program that will show you what is taking up the space on your computer. Extract it from the zip file, install it and run. You can then see the file/s taking up the space and perhaps put a stop to it.

Timo

 

[kidicarus]

Ok I have run the program and taken a screenshot, pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys seems to be taking up the most space.

Yfrog Image : yfrog.com/3osevendrivej

 

[kidicarus]

It would also seem that windows media player is downloading all the artwork for music I have stored in my itunes folder!!

 

[TimStitt]

I agree with you , it look like you have the retrieve additional information text box ticked. I guess you can either add more space and leave it overnight to update or turn this feature off. Pagefile and hiberfil look normal.

 

[kidicarus]

I agree with you , it look like you have the retrieve additional information text box ticked. I guess you can either add more space and leave it overnight to update or turn this feature off. Pagefile and hiberfil look normal.

Recently I shared my pc with another machine so I could share music with a machine I have in another room and it would appear that WMP has been downloading the folder art for those files, it started losing the space when I did that and so far has used 12 GB of space! Is it ok to delete that file and reclaim the space?

 

[TimStitt]

Yes it is and you also may decide to turn off media streaming in the Control Panel Items\Network and Sharing Center\Advanced sharing settings. This will stop other media machines being detected.