Significant discrepancy between All in C:\ and Local DIsk (C:) space
I have a 250GB NVME drive installed in my system, which has been showing as red because of the shortage of available space for some time. I have run disk cleanup multiple times. It recovers a couple of gigabytes of space, but never enough to get out of the red, which struck me as odd as I don’t install hardly anything on this drive, other than the Windows 10 OS and a few core programs such as Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and Dreamweaver, Libre Office, etc, everything else is installed on the larger (D:) drive.
I’m not sure what made me open the C drive, show hidden files, and select all files and folders to check the size of the files on the disk. Surprisingly, it returned 142GB of used space, not the 228GB reported in This PC. This sent me down a rabbit hole about why this could be, as that is a lot of drive space unaccounted for. As I just happened to be talking to my friend James that afternoon, he got dragged down the rabbit hole with me, and I think that I might have broken his brain a little bit with my explanations of how various storage-related technologies work, but I think he’d agree it was worth it!
I did a lot of Googling, but I didn’t find much to explain why there was such a large discrepancy. I had a feeling it was something Windows-related, and part of it was, but a more substantial part was not. I recently did a clean install of Windows 11 on my wife’s computer, and it was basically a clean install except for Chrome and Adobe Reader. There was also a discrepancy between Local Disk (C:) and All in C:/, albeit much smaller, which led me to believe it was related to hidden files that the OS could not see.
Some Google results led me to a freeware program called WinDirStat, which I installed and scanned my C drive, where I found large blocks of data in the visual representation of the data. Upon clicking on the data block, it was a 67GB dmp.full file in the Users/[username]/AppData/LocalLow/Adobe/CRLogs directory. I deleted that file and launched Lightroom, and it took a while to rebuild the log file, but the dump.full file was only 6.7GB this time. This file seems to have been appended to; since I reinstalled the OS in 2021, turning it into a monster file, 90% bigger than needed, based on the before and after sizes.
Another large file was Windows-related: a 29GB hiberfil.sys. This is a file to recover from hibernating your computer, which makes sense as until recently, I had 32GB of RAM installed. However, as I have never set this PC to hibernate, this seems odd. I guess this file is created regardless of the hibernation setting. After some more Googling, I found this could be disabled, which I did, as I could not delete the file. To disable it, I simply open a cmd prompt and ran ‘powercfg.exe /hibernate off’, after which I could delete the file.
My friend also ran WinDirStat and found huge files left over from games he had uninstalled a long time ago, just sitting there eating up large chunks of available disk space. I recommend that everyone download and install WinDirStat. It’s free and can literally save you hundreds of gigabytes of space, not to mention money, as the saved space could be the difference between buying a larger storage drive or not.
I do agree that going down this rabbit hole was ultimately worth it. But for a while there it had me questioning my sanity. WinDirStat is excellent. Ultimately it helped me reclaim about 90GB storage on my C drive. The main culprit was Star Citizen which left around 72GB of files after being uninstalled…