Often, I am asked the question “Where Did My Storage Space Go?”. In this post, I would try to solve that problem. Let me begin this blog post with a recent experience I faced due to the use of Download Managers. Day before yesterday, I shut down my laptop and it did so peacefully. On starting the laptop again, I got a message from Windows that there is not enough space in the C: drive and it could cause performance slowdown. I was like, are you kidding me? I had around 150GB free last night so what caused Windows to pop up that message? I immediately opened up Explorer and found that C: drive was completely filled with 0 Bytes free. After some initial diagnostics of Malware Scans, I came to the conclusion that the system was malware free. So, I started out checking the folders one by one and after an hour or so, I found that the Download Manager (Internet Download Manager) was trying to download a partially complete file despite no internet connection and it filled up it’s Temporary Folder. I cleaned the Temporary Folder and I got my space back. It seems that the Download Manager I was using does not work well with Proxifier causing it to keep on garbage files (Logs) even if there is no internet.
So, I was baffled by the fact that it took me around an hour to find the location which was taking up most of the space even though I keep my C: drive organized and clean it from time to time. I tried searching for an online utility which could tell me the space occupied by a file/folder in a nice way and I won’t have to check the properties of each file/folder manually.
I came across WinDirStat.