Over the last month or so I have noticed that the free space on one of my machines hard drives is slowly disappearing. Just over a month ago it was at 69.1 gigs free space. It is now at 68.5 and I have not added anything to this machine. There is no music, video, pics or anything stored on it. So in a month or so I have lost .6 gig of space which is over 500MB. What could cause this? I run CCleaner daily so it isn't temp file junk. I just installed the latest Windows updates and rebooted. Checked the free space and down another .2 gig.

If you got XP, run chkdsk. Right click target drive, choose Properties, go to 'Tools' tab. On 'Error checking' click "Check now", then check first option and hit Start. If prompted to reboot, do so.

I ran the check. Had to restart and did that. It ran on start up and than finished the scan and machine started up normally. No problems that I could see.

One thing I did notice today. I went to defrag with JK Defrag. I like to take a look at the what the disk looks like before I do this with the Windows built in defrag. I just select analyze and it gives a report and picture of the disk. I than run JK Defrag. Than I use the Windows defrag and analyze again. I get a before and after picture of the disk. Any ways today when I did the analyze with the Windows defrag the picture of the disk looked much different than usual. Check this out


That bunch of files on the far right is never there. I last defraged just over a month ago and they were not there when I did. So they have appeared since my problem started.

So chkdsk didn't helped?

Anthony A are you by chance using AVG Anti-Virus?
I only ask because at random it can create some .AVG files that are about 41 MB each and they'll eventually start to gobble up allot of space, even GB's of space. If you're using AVG Anti-Virus get the most update cleaner for it located in the Winapp2.ini thread.

If that isn't the problem, it's obviously something else.

No change when I ran the check disk. I checked the first option, "Automatically fix file system errors".

Yes I am running AVG and also have the whole winapp2.

How can I find out what those files are on the defrag analyze. They must be the problem. Something is adding files taking up space.

Well the current winapp2.ini will deal with those bloated .avg files located in "C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Grisoft" and/or the sub-folders of that directory.

As for figuring out where those files are coming from via JkDefrag I don't know because I'm solely using Contig and Windows Defragmenter. I know in Windows Defragmenter that when you run Analyze, then click View Report and it will show you a list of what files are fragmented.

If you have system restore turned on, that can gooble up space....just a thought

Yes I have system restore turned on all my machines but just the one machine is having this issue. I haven't changed the settings on how much disk space is used for system restore since I installed windows in it in October so I don't think it would all of a sudden be the problem. Could be though. Machine runs perfect and this started a month ago or about.

I remember some post here about that. I looked in those files and they are fine.

Vista especially eats up a lot of space with system restore.

Andavari's idea of some kind of logs slowly eating the space sounds logical.

How do you connect to the internet, does it keep logs anywhere, or perhaps firewall logs?

You could have a look at your program files in c drive and when you hover curser over the folder see if the amount shown is way out of line. Some software has been know to just grow with info it doesn't or shouldn't need to save.

It could be the swap/paging file too.
That's the only other thing I can think of at the moment that would consume so much space so quickly.

Yes, it could be that too. It might be in variable size. It's good to lock pagefile to one size to increase performance. Even better to disable it completely, if you got plenty of ram.

It can be deleted during shutdown/restart via a tweak found on Kellys-Korner-XP.com - WinXP Tweaks.
However disabling it or setting a particular size "may" also cause some problems such as some programs that have never crashed before all of a sudden will crash or run out of memory, etc. Well at least that's what I experienced in the Windows 98 days of hacking about with the swap/paging file - not sure if the same holds true for Windows XP (and newer) though since I haven't messed with the swap/paging file since my Win98 days.

It can be cleared, not deleted.

Well, 98 is whole another story... I haven't got any problems with pagefile disabled in my XP. I got 1536Mb of ram.

Isn't there a formula you can use to work out the best size for your swap file?

I remember back when I had windows 98 with 128mb RAM and a 8gb HD the optimum swap size was "150"...,or at least thats what I was told to enter in the box!

Never really understood the relationships involved, or for that matter the figures..

Thumbrule is to set pagefile 1.5X of your system memory. So if you got 512Mb of memory, you set pagefile to 768.

Just to give folks some idea of what swap/paging file is and how to set it

http://computermemoryupgrade.mysuperpc.com...file_size.shtml

This is what I just did. After the mention about system restore maybe being the problem I went in to C drive properties and selected "disk cleanup". There is an option in there to delete all but your most recent restore point. Since the machine is running great I felt comfortable doing that. When I did my free space went up to 69.9 gig. I gained over a gig of space back. I actually have more space than before I noticed this problem. I probably will go into system restore and really cut down the setting for how much space it can use. It's still strange though because I don't use this machine nearly as much as my other and this didn't happen to the other one. In fact I never really had this happen on any machine.

As for the page file I have not touched it. It's at default or whatever it sets itself at when Windows is installed. This machine has 1.5 gig of ram.

1% is enough. Though, i got SR disabled completely.



As it says in site what hazelnut posted:

Setting the "Initial size" and "Maximum size" to the same values increases efficiency and performance since Windows does not have to manage re-sizing the swap file.

Disabling pagefile is even better, because then Windows don't have to read and write to hard disk all time, but keeping all the data in system memory. This requires that you got enough system ram.

It was at 6%. Not anymore.

That (1.5x memory) is only the minimum amount to use. From Microsoft:

Link

As many places recommend setting min and max values the same I set min and max on mine to 3x RAM (I have 512Mb so set pagefile to 1536Mb)

That happens on my system after windows has run the ProcessIdleTasks command (LINK), which it does every 3 days or so, always a small group of files moved out to the right of the disk display. To see if thats what is causing it you could defrag, check the disk analysis, then run the ProcessIdleTasks (Run>Rundll32.exe advapi32.dll,ProcessIdleTasks) command manually, then check the disk analysis again and see if you see the result you mentioned with files moved to right of disk (open task manager and make sure the defrag processes are finished to know if the command has finished, takes about 5 mins).

I found this a nuisance though as it undoes JKDefrags good work and am pleased to say I discovered Microsoft's TweakUI has an option to disable this - in the General section untick 'Optimise hard disk when idle'. Or you can edit the registry directly to disable it - LINK

You may want to have a look at your disk space usage with the app below.
SequoiaView

Hi all
Been reading with great interest about hard drives free space shrinking, and used space mysteriously growing.
I decided to clean up the (System Restore Check Points) and recovered over 9GB of space back

That is interesting. The "optimize hard disk when idle" actually un optimizes ( is there such a word ) the disk. I guess Tweak UI is going in.

Wow. What did you have System Restore set at for disk space to use?

Hi Anthony A
I just had a look, and it was set at 12% (22893 MB) so I reduced it back to 1% (2469 MB)
Initially Windows probably set it according to the size of my hard drive (200 GB)

Indeed. I went an awful long time not knowing why I kept getting that group of files being moved to a big area of free space. Admittedly the ProcessIdleTasks command can speed up Windows startup if run occasionly but I'd rather choose when that is (I have the command in a batch file and run it once every couple of months now), not have Windows do it twice a week and shaking up my JKD optimised disk

I don't got that "EnableAutoLayout" value in registry. XP SP2.

Just install Tweak UI, then you wont have to manually edit the registry.