Fewer GBs after Defrag?

This may not be the proper place to put this but I figured it would get the most attention here so here goes

I Defragged my hard drive last night, and again this afternoon. I have neglected chore over the past month or two, so I decided to take care of it. I went from having around 23 or so GB of free space on my C: drive, to only having 2.77 GB free. I wonder why this is? Shouldn't the defrag. process free up space on my drive? Each time I run the program again I continue to lose space, by a certain amount of MBs each time. If I ran Defraggler in Safe Mode would that fix my issue? Has anyone had this issue before?

Thanks for your input!

It shouldn't free up space, but it definitely shouldn't remove it either...very strange.

Try using a different defrag program?

Well, I didn't mean "free up space" but that's all I could think of at the time of writing . I'll try a program from Auslogics, and see if that works. Any more suggestions?

Defragging only condenses data closer together so it doesn't take as long to read the data. If you are losing hard drive space, either you are infected or system restore is taking up too much space.

Hmm, I haven't noticed any changes in performance in my system. My Malwarebytes scans and logs come up empty. I guess I can post another Hijack this log and see what comes up, but I don't think that is the case. I'll take a look at system restore and see how many points I have. I'll post back in a little while.

there is a good chance that you are infected with a worm....and when you defragged you gave the worm more to feed on....I have had something similar to this happen before

Whoa, you freaked me out there. Wouldn't you know if you had a worm because of a system slow down or something to that extent? I deleted my previous system restore points and that freed up around 9 or 10 GBs. I had quite a few. I think that was it, but the worm statements and things like that have gotten me worried.