What's a good way to see what's taking up a lot of HDD space?

[johnb35]

On the left hand side click on unknown and then check the bubble map to see where that space is. Been searching online and its either errors on the HDD or system protection like system restore. So you might wan to run checkdisk and check to see how much space system restore is using.

 

[JohnJSal]

On the left hand side click on unknown and then check the bubble map to see where that space is. Been searching online and its either errors on the HDD or system protection like system restore. So you might wan to run checkdisk and check to see how much space system restore is using.

I did run checkdisk and it didn't seem to turn up any problems that I saw. It completed and the last message I saw was "Disk is clean" or something like that. It never stopped to notify me of any issues, and I watched most of it and didn't see anything. Is there some other way to do a checkdisk than to run chkdsk c:?

I think I have system restore turned off. How can I check this and delete it if it's not off?

Also, clicking on Unknown highlights the giant yellow rectangle. I'm not sure what else to do to find out more information about what it is.

 

[JohnJSal]

I found this about the Unknown portion:

"This mysterious item is just the difference between what Windows reports as the free space on the volume minus size of the files WDS can access. Please note the partWDS can access! This is the important point here. WDS cannot access the files under System Volume Information on all the (NTFS?) drives, so it cannot sum up the sizes of these items."

That helps explain what it is in general, but not how to fix it.

 

[johnb35]

Right click on computer, click on properties, click on system protection on the left, then system restore tab if its not already there. In the middle box, it should say if system restore is enabled on drive C. click on configure if its enabled and then check disabled and then ok to reset it. What brand of drive do you have?

 

[JohnJSal]

Good news! It turns out it was the system restore after all! I thought I had turned it off, but I guess I didn't. I also thought I had checked this yesterday, but I went to the wrong place. It was using 220GB of my hard drive! So I deleted all that and turned it off, and now it's smooth sailing with 300GB of free space!

Thank you so much to everyone who helped. Several of you kept saying system restore, and finally I listened! So thanks for leading me to the water AND making me drink!

 

[johnb35]

I knew it was. I would actually leave it turned on, but just lower the size that it uses down to say 5 percent of your total disk space.

 

[JohnJSal]

I may do that. About how much space is needed to safely have at least one full backup? I definitely don't need ten different restore points. If it just did one rolling one, that might be okay.

Also, which option is better in the configure settings: restore system settings and files, or just files?

 

[johnb35]

System settings and files. I would just set it for 5% of your drive which would 23gb dedicated space. I don't think I would go much lower, no lower than 3%.

 

[JohnJSal]

Thanks!