Insane disk usage

Hey,
My laptop’s been running like absolute garbage lately. So, I headed over to IBM to check my partition usage, and man, what a mess. It’s telling me I’ve only got about 44GB left out of 180GB on my C drive. I went digging through that C drive to find the culprit, highlighted everything, and checked the properties—total size comes out to 45GB. So, where the hell did the rest go? What happened to those other 90ish GB just... vanishing? If anyone knows what’s going on, please help me out. Thanks!

The first step in figuring out what’s actually broken before we even talk solutions is just running a disk check. Right-click the drive, hit properties, then run check disk. Let me know what it says.

darkowl72 said:Look, the first step to actually solving this mess is running a disk check. Just right-click the drive, hit properties, and run the check disk tool. Let me know what it finds.

Are you talking about: Right-click - Properties - Tools - Error checking -> Check now?

Alright, I'll let you know once the scan finishes.

P.S. Where am I supposed to find the results after it's done?

Just grab WinDirStat. It’ll show you exactly which folders are eating up your hard drive space.

Take a look at how much space your system restore is eating up.

wiredcyclist82 said:Just grab WinDirStat. It’ll show you exactly which folders are eating up your drive space.

Well, John Doe shows me this:
1.part


2.part


3.part


4.part

Yeah, figured that's where those gigabytes were hiding.
Just do what Larry Ortiz5 said. Shrink that System Restore space. You even bother defragging your drive?

wiredcyclist82 said:Yeah, figured that's where those gigabytes were hiding.
Do what Larry Ortiz5 suggested. Shrink that System Restore space. Also, are you even running a defrag on your drive?

How do I actually do that? And am I going to wreck my OS or lose my files if I mess with it?

I run a defrag every once in a while. But honestly? It's been a couple of months since the last one. Going to go do it right now. :P

Just head into System, hit up System Protection, and click configure. It won't mess with your OS or any of your files. Just set it to somewhere between 5 and 10 GB. That should do the trick.

All that junk was piling up in that folder because I had my defrag tool set to run in VSS mode. Switched it back to standard mode. Problem solved.

wiredcyclist82 said:Go into System, hit up System Protection, and just click "Configure." It won’t mess with your OS or touch any of your actual data, so don't sweat it. Just set the limit to somewhere between 5 and 10 GB. That should be plenty.

Thanks, wiredcyclist82. 🙏 Here’s the latest on my disk space situation. (P.S. I’ve got about 20GB sitting there in restore points, just in case.)

wiredcyclist82 said:So, I had all this junk piling up in that folder because I messed with my defrag settings. I set it to run in VSS mode, which was clearly a mistake. Once I realized what was happening, I switched it back to the standard mode. Problem solved, I guess?

Where am I supposed to go to set this up? How does one even find that setting?

I don't even know which defrag tool you're running. Honestly, why bother stressing? It’s not like your folder is going to balloon past the restore limit you set anyway.