Need Computer Help

Here's the problem I'm having: I'm losing diskspace at an alarming rate.

It would make sense months ago, as I was busy cutting and editing a film I was working on - all of the files that went into the project were taking up G Bs and G Bs of diskspace, but however, when all was said and done, and the film (two versions) was exported and all of the project files were deleted, I still had less diskspace than I did before I started. Before I started, I had about 480-something GB of free diskspace. The two versions of the film together are barely 2GB, but my free space kept dropping to 464GB.

That was back in February, and since then, my free diskspace has been going down like a barrel over Niagra Falls. Now last month, I lost additional diskspace, but I can understand that one, as I had downloaded and imported some video files to my harddrive, so I can see where that would eat up some diskspace.

But now, I'm down to 448GB of free diskspace. In three months, I've lost nearly 35GB of free diskspace, and I have no idea why! I'm very cautious about harm that can befall computers, such as viruses, trojans, worms, spyware, malware, that sort of thing, so it's a habit with me that I clean out my computer on a nighly basis - cookies, cache, temporary internet files, I clean 'em all out every night; I also will go through my programs and delete recent shortcuts; I also run virus scans and spyware scans on a weekly basis and rarely turn up anything. And other than that, I just don't keep a lot of files on my harddrive in general - with the exception of a folder I have with a bunch of World's Dumbest... clips I download and import, most of my files I keep on external storage devices.

Is anybody here tech-savvy enough to help me figure out how I keep losing free diskspace at such an alarming rate? My computer has a capacity to hold upwards of 580GB of diskspace.

I would reccomend backing up your stuff and completely formatting your hard drive. Or if you are queasy about it download Ccleaner and format the unused parts of your hard drive. Ccleaner is really easy to use.

Now, how long have you owned that hard drive? What model and brand is it? Over time hard drives develop bad sectors and lose overall physical capacity, specially if you skimped on it when you bought it.

edited 1st May '15 3:58:29 PM by ElRigo

As well, see if there's some log files that are taking up space somewhere.

@El Rigo I've had it for about three years, and it was completely maxed out when I got it: 8GB RAM and 580GB diskspace - both of which were about twice as much as most standard computers came with at the time. It's really only been within the last number of months or so that the amount of free diskspace I've been losing has been growing steadily. It's a HP Pavilion g7 with intel, and it runs Windows 7. I might look into Ccleaner like you suggested, I have a feeling if I attempted formatting my harddrive I might screw it up, then I'd really be SOL.

@Troper/The_Mattias I'll look into that as well; even though I don't have it anymore, I know MWBAMW used to store log files whenever it completed a scan.

Hey, if you have the time I could help you directly. I mean, the time to do it and maybe a chatroom where we can speak faster.

After downloading and running Ccleaner, and cleaning up a bunch of stuff, including a few registry errors, also uninstalling a couple of programs that I don't even use, that brought me back up to 470GB of freespace.

Interestingly enough, even though I uninstalled it long ago, Ccleaner still turned up Firefox on my system, and I couldn't even find it, until finally I found it by accident when looking for something else in one of my hidden folders (the Mozilla folder was in a hidden system folder).

Now, it turns out, what was really eating up much of my diskspace was videos, and I had a lot more video files that I thought I had, so I backed up all that I could that was under 700MB in file size and deleted them from their respective folders (both versions of the film I did were 886MB each, another special I did years ago is 1.14GB, and my World's Dumbest... folder is 11.6GB, so these are all still on my harddrive). I also found some old restore points I could delete, among other things. After doing all that, that gave me an additional 3GB of freespace, so now I'm back up to 473GB of freespace.

Out of curiosity, I went through every single file (documents, pictures, music, videos, programs) that I've saved/installed/downloaded/etc. since work on the film began, and all of those (including the film itself) add up about 3.25GB, which means without those I would have about 476-7GB of freespace right now - still less than what I started with, but nowhere near as bad as it was before I did all of this. I'm pretty sure software/program updates and upgrades over the years have contributed somehow to the loss of freespace over time.

So I think I'll keep a steadier eye on things for the time being. El Rigo, I'll definitely get in touch with you if something like this happens again and I'm unsure what to do, thanks for the help.