My C: drive is filling up way too fast

As the title suggests, I’ve been running into a rather perplexing issue over the last few days; it seems as though roughly 5 or 6 GB of my storage has simply "vanished" into thin air, despite the fact that I haven't installed any new software or downloaded any large files lately. 😲 😲

To make matters even more unsettling, I seem to have lost another half a gigabyte just this evening. It feels as if something is actively consuming my space behind the scenes, and I am feeling quite a bit of urgency to resolve this. Does anyone happen to have some immediate advice on how I might track down this disappearing data?

I did run a full system scan with Eset overnight, but unfortunately, it yielded no results whatsoever.

It looks like some software ate your system restore points
http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/3187/...-in-windows-7/

You might find yourself having to run that cleanup process every once in a while. I'm not entirely sure if a recent macOS update messed things up or what, but it keeps resetting back to 20%.

So, look, just open up your command prompt—you know, just hit start and type in cmd.exe—and then go ahead and punch in
- for today: dir C:\ /s > c:\dirlist1.txt
- then tomorrow, or basically whenever you notice something feels funky or things start looking different: dir C:\ /s > c:\dirlist2.txt

Once you've got both, you're gonna need to compare those two files to see what changed. If you aren't quite sure how to do that, honestly, just upload them somewhere online and drop the link right here in the thread

🤣 (I mean, I'm pretty sure you get why we're doing this)

@hollowmaker20: I keep getting this "access denied" error message

If I were to disable System Restore entirely, that wouldn't be the smartest move, would it?

It’s quite perplexing; just yesterday I had about 1.8 GB of free space available, but today it has dwindled down to 1.5 GB
without me having actually performed any tasks on the computer at all.

which macOS are we even talking about here? you seriously have to run it as an administrator first

1.5 GB of free space left? man, honestly, that is basically nothing at this point, isn't it?

week

To give you some context, I currently have roughly 7 GB of free space left on my C: drive... it seems that over the last five or six days, about 6 GB of mysterious data has just piled up out of nowhere.

I decided to go ahead and run WinDirStat to see what was going on.

Here is how the analysis looks at the moment:

http://i59.tinypic.com/2vb4gaw.jpg

Honestly, you can just wipe everything in that temp folder clean. You might get those annoying little pop-ups saying some file is in use and won't let you delete it... just skip over those ones, okay? Then just give it another look once you're done.

Goodness gracious, what a chaotic stretch I've had. Last night started with the forum being completely inaccessible, and then my mouse decided to simply stop responding altogether. To make matters worse, the issue persisted well into this morning, leaving me quite stranded. I eventually gave in and purchased a new mouse, but when I finally booted up my computer, I was met with a rather baffling sight: I suddenly have 4.3 GB of free space on my C: drive, even though I haven't deleted a single file myself! It’s all very unsettling.
🤔

I suppose the only prudent course of action is to run some deep scans with ESET and Malwarebytes just to be safe...

On a side note, regarding these temporary files—can I just go ahead and delete them manually, or would you recommend using a specific utility for that?

🤣

yes

oh sure, little plays

edit: someone was a bit too quick on the draw 😁

Thanks so much for the assistance!

After I cleared out my temporary files, I thought I had managed to claw back about 10 GB of space.

However, once I ran those scans with the software you suggested (and goodness, Malwarebytes found a staggering 2,500 pieces of spyware!), I'm actually down to just 7.5 GB now.🤔

Uninstall any programs you aren't actually using and move everything from your Users folder (and all its subfolders) over to a different drive. It’s honestly a miracle macOS even functions with that little space left; I can't run an update or even create a system restore point, nothing... Did you disable your virtual memory or something?

How did you partition your drive, and how big is your C: drive anyway?

darkowl72 said:Uninstall any programs you aren't actually using and move everything from your Users folder (and all its subfolders) over to a different drive. It’s honestly a miracle macOS even functions with that little space left; I can't run an update or even create a system restore point, nothing... Did you disable your virtual memory or something?

How did you partition your drive, and how big is your C: drive anyway?

Is it actually possible for me to just move the entire "Users" directory myself—like, via a simple cut-and-paste to, say, the D: drive? I worry that changing the file path might cause some sort of catastrophic mess with my settings.

I haven't disabled anything, I promise. 🤷

I have both C and D partitions, but the total capacity on C is only about 59 GB.

Not really possible.

You’ve gotta right-click and hit properties on each of those default user folders (Downloads, Getty Images, desktop...) and you should see a Change location tab there.

Or just clear out the folders—move whatever you need to somewhere else to free up some space, and you can leave the empty folders behind. Just make sure you only touch stuff under Users; definitely don't mess with Program Files...