I don’t know exactly why but recently, I did a [right-click] > Properties on my disk C:, in the Windows Explorer and I saw that there was less than 70 Gb available left on a disk supposed to be a 512 Gb one.
A bad surprise, so I just checked more closely to find eventual culprits : on the disk, I have just 9 folders, 3 of them being empty or close to it. For the other ones I get this :
Overall, an amount of space used of less than 250 Gb. How to explain the difference of 155 Gb between the total of space used by the folders and the reported space used in the Disk C: properties ?
FWIW, the involved disk is a SSD m.2 WD Black Caviar (512 Gb) - Windows 10 pro 22H2. The whole system has been purchased mounted in november 2019, but I made the Windows installation.
There’s a cleanup function in Windows which I think goes through all sorts of temporary files and the trash etc. and just deletes them. Might be worth running that to see if you regain some space.
Yep, now I remember that there is one indeed. Using my administrator account, I’m going to try to retrieve it and report back what it could bring. Thanks for the suggestion…
The fact is that I have two accounts : an administrator and a ‘usual’ one, and I did the space checks presented on my OP with the latter. So, I went to the administrator one and used the Windows disk optimization tool. Doing this, I retrieved 6.6 Gb of space : better than nothing, but still not at the level of the difference between the sum of the space used by the folders and the reported space used in the disk properies.
At a point and still connected on my administrator account, I went again to check the different folders and instead of the previous 132 Gb value for the Users one, I got… 258 Gb. Detailing, there was 132 Gb for my ‘usual’ user account and 125 Gb for the administrator one, which I almost never use, beside for installation tasks.
To make things as short as possible, it appeared that I had, in the latter, a huge Download folder : in it, notably, there was two Steinberg (85.4 Gb) and FXPansion (BFD3 - 37.8 Gb) subfolders. Overall, more than 4 years of downloads used to install programs, libraries, etc. that were still there, not visible from my usual account and completely forgotten.
At the end, I got rid of the whole administrator Download folder content and I have now 198 Gb of free space instead of 67. Problem solved and lesson taken : do NOT check disk and folders weights under an usual account : use an administrator one instead.
