find out where all the hard drive space is going?

[The Grinch]

Does anyone know of some sort of program that will tell me where all my hard drive space is?

i just bought a 320 gig hard drive with 298gig usable space and for some reason when i goto the hard drive properties its says i'm using 128 gigs of space. I don't see how this can be since i only basically cloned my 80 gig hard drive. It's been a week or so since i've done this, so i suppose some new temp files have taken advantage of this and did something.

Maybe system restore is hogging all the space?

I have tons of music files and digital pictures that i've taken on my computer, so i thought maybe they took the space.

But my user folder on vista is only 57.1GB
My downloads folder is only: 7.6 GB
The Programs Folder is only: 8.41 GB.
Windows Vista Folder is: 8.20 GB.
Which all total around 81.31gb.

Those are the only main folders I have.
i've already ran disk clean up and it deleted alot of the error logs and such that vista stores, and it was around 2 gigs including the cache's etc.
Disk cleanup wont allow me to gain anymore space.

So does anyone have any ideas on what is hogging up my hard drive?
is there some type of program that'll tell me?

I never seen the system restore take up soo much space. But maybe thats it?

Thanks
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http://www.JoshX.com -- my personal site
http://www.damnidunno.com -- i dunno

[LP-SolidRaven]

1) Partition table & File table take up space
2) Gb != GB
3) System Volume Information, Recycle Bin and other crap like that on windows systems
4) http://windirstat.info/ might be useful in finding useless files
5) Files might be bigger on the hard drive then they actually are.
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Dilly dally, shilly shally.

[The Grinch]

Did you really just reply to my topic and say that Gb is the same as GB?
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http://www.JoshX.com -- my personal site
http://www.damnidunno.com -- i dunno

[LP-Harvey]

[Xtreme $niper]

Yep, in addition to the partition table taking up some space, there's also the fact that you'll never get the exact number of storage space as advertised.

If you buy a 16GB iPod Touch, you'll probably only have 14GB to use.

I bought a 100GB Macbook, but if I remember right it came with about 85GB free space (OS taking up some of the space, and the fact that it never had 100GB usable space to begin with).
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[Rashy]

I use this tool:

http://www.jgoodies.com/freeware/jdiskreport/

To tell me where my space is going. It gives you a tree and diagram view telling you how much space each directory is using.
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Rashy!

[krt]

http://www.google.com/Top/Comp....._Analysis/

FileLight (what I use) is Linux only so I have no recommendations. I had a quick look at jDiskReport and Disk Size Manager but they look cruddy, however they will probably do the job.

Another thing I used to use is a shell extension that shows the sizes of sub-folders plus contents in a tab of the parent folder's Properties dialog:
http://www.softpedia.com/get/S.....sion.shtml

(that's not nor wasn't my crap ridden computer)

[The Grinch]

Ohh my bad. Just thought he might've been in a bad mood, but now i understand. I'm not that well into the tech lingo please forgive me.

So what you're saying is that my hard drive isnt actually using that much space? Is that even possible? Or do you mean me buying a 320 gig hard drive and only have 290 or so of actual hard drive usage space?

If so then its not my problem. My problem is it telling me that im actually using this much space, and all my file properties never say that they are even big enough. I don't know anything about the system cache and etc doubling the space usage of the actual files and such. Maybe it's possible? I don't know. Just never heard of that or had the problem before.

I'll post about this on a tech forum and see if i can get help in both places

I'll also check out those tools.


Thanks everyone.
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http://www.JoshX.com -- my personal site
http://www.damnidunno.com -- i dunno

[Myst]

With the 320 = 290 gig thing, it's just the way that the hard drive manufacturers define their space.

A proper gigabyte, as you and I and the computer understand it is 1024 x 1024 x 1024 bytes (that is, 1024 megabytes, where 1 megabyte is equal to 1024 kilobytes where one kilobyte is equal to 1024 bytes).

However, the hard drive manufacturers, in an effort to make it sound like they have more space, define a gigabyte (or Gb or something) as 1000 x 1000 x 1000 bytes. Which means you have some error in the calculation.

Hence you have less than you think you might have

However, with your problem, have you checked for hidden folders anywhere that Windows/whatever OS you're using might not want you to be finding?

[drath]

I use a program called TreeSize Professional. http://www.jam-software.com/treesize/

I also believe there is a freeware version with less complex features.
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[gluxon]

Windows boot files take up a lot of space. And they're usually hidden. So to see them you need to go to the control panel and click on folder options. Click on the view tab and enable hidden files and show windows operating system files. There's also two files called pagefil.sys and hiberfil.sys that (together) take up double the amount of ram you have.
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Hi!

[LP-SolidRaven]

Gluxon please stop reviving threads.


And to add to this:

[ClickFanatic]

I always disable System Restore on my hard disk. It just eats space and I have never had positive results with it. It just breaks more than it fixes when I restore something. A fresh install is often the best way to go if there is nothing else to resort to.

Other than that I use CCleaner to get rid of unwanted temporary files (basically all temporary files except browser history and cookies for my primary browser) and Defraggler for a rather nice defrag algorithm (defragmentation can slightly improve available disk space, too).

About the kilobyte discussion...
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If you can read this, my post is on an alternating background.

[marinaroz]

Oh, it's definitely System Restore. I've had the same problem when I bought my computer with Vista pre-installed. The disk space just got eaten up, more and more each day, and I was going crazy. At some point there were 90GB missing in action.

I think someone from here told me it was System Restore, I then googled for it and found a command line code that'll show how much of your space is being used up. I don't remember that code now, but you should try googling for it, and for a way to limit it.
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Tarakana NET

[eVisu]

Vista is the problem, my dad went through the same ordeal. He phoned Sony, at first they lied, sent a new HD out, they lied again, took the laptop in for repair, third time lucky they told us the truth. Strangely, I can't remember what they said, I'm sure it had something to do with backups or something, but yeah it eats HD space up like a goat.