System (C) drive filling up but from what??

[GMJim]

After getting my new system up and running for about three months I've noticed the drive is filling up but with what? This computer is used very rarely because the old system it was built to replace is still working well. After the Windows install and all of my programs I had about 21gb of used space on my 80gb Intel SSD. Now it says 25.5gb used?? I've checked the usual places like internet cache and also checked Bit Defender which has been known to act up and collect junk but can't find where all this stuff is going. I could understand a few hundred mb coming and going but 4.5gb is a significant amount of space when you have an 80gb. SSD that you're trying to keep the junk off of. I'm also using Adobe Lightroom 2 where I import 1.5 to 2 gb of pictures to edit but these pics are imported to another hard disk. Is there any way to track or find newly written files to see where they're going or coming from? I'm not at the stage where I have to be concerned yet. 25.5 gb used and 74.5 gb of free space. Does anybody have any ideas I can try?
Thanks
Jim

[Arinoth]

Have you disabled Windows back up? That is where you are losing several GBs to as its making back up images practically daily and if you never clean them out they add up.

Also, have you done a disk clean up to clear out all of the setup/install files it caches when windows install itself, same with clearing out 'temp' folders certain applications will make such as nvidia or ati.

[sswilson]

Did you check your swap file? I see you're running 4G of memory.... I'd be willing to bet that windows is using a 4G+ swap file on that drive. I had a similar issue with my 8G system.

[GMJim]

Thanks for the replies. I thought windows back up was something I had to do manually? Anyway when I do a manual windows back up I get an error. Seems a lot of people are struggling with this feature.
w7x64rc backup fails with error code 0x81000019
At the moment I don't have a back up plan. I'm going to do a Acronis image when I figure out how.

Is it safe to do a disk clean up with a SSD? And how do I check the swap file? I understand SSD's are different than regular drives but I thought I would need the swap file active?

Thanks again for the help.
Jim

[JD]

There's also the hibernation file that should be disabled unless you absolutely need to hibernate your machine.

Also try out CCleaner. Should cleanup all the temp files floating around.

And as others have said, you can move the page file off of the SSD to a hard drive, or set it to a fixed size so you won't see your free space varying.

[AkG]

Windows 7 - Ultimate SSD Speed Tweaks

Should be std for everyone using SSDs.

Instead of disabling the pg file....I prefer to move it (unless I have like 12GB of ram in the sys).

Performance Boost: Move Page File to Another Physical Drive | Windows Vista Maintenance | Windows Tools, Help & Guides

To check where all your space is going...try
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics
Will show you where and what is sucking up all your space :)

[sswilson]

It probably wouldn't be "Windows Backup" but instead would be your restore point(s) taking up space. You can set Windows up for a max drive space as far as restore points go, or do away with it all together (I'd recommend having at least one restore point).

[tzetsin]

simple to find out, use "spacemonger" its a freeish utility that will give you a visual representation of whats on your hard drive. the two majors of course are the page and hibernate files. even if you turn off the hibernate file (which is the same size as the total amount of ram you have) it stays there, so you actually have to manually remove it, like this...

Open up "cmd" in admin mode,
Type this command.
powercfg -h off
and reboot.

[_dangtx_]

when in doubt, treesize is your best frend. i cleaned once some 100 or more gigs of reports from av l;ol

[IvanAndreevich]

What about the Windows temp folder? I get gigs of crap there.