5 Unexpected Reasons Your Computer's Storage is Full 

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Not many would understand or care but I really appreciate that dark souls lore satire in the beginning xD

My storage kept getting full every week, so I had to delete something every time. Turns out DaVinci Resolve used hundreds of gigabytes to store render cache. Thank you for this video

Also a worthy candidate: the AMD folder in C:. I freed up 20gb by deleting old updates which for some reason were still there.

There is no way you just made this video! Last night my harddrive filled up completely, that can't be a coincidence!

Another thing which takes up a lot of storage space, is Windows update. The old updates are stored for quite long, and many of them can take up as much storage as the OS in total itself. If you run StorageSense, it shouldn't be much of a problem, but you can always clear out old Windows update files if you need storage in a pinch.

Another thing I think should be mentioned Both old windows versions and temporary files for programs like after effects and photoshop, The auto delete feature on ae doesnt work very well and ps doesn't delete the temp files sometimes when you close the application. Which both can add up over time

You should really mention about apps installed from the windows store as it doesn’t show inside of windirstat until you select show unknown space and even then it doesn’t show what is using the space but I’ve found that it is at least something to check if anyone has been installing large games in the windows store. Normally I’d go to the usual place in windows to remove or even possibly move such programs. Though I find it funny how windirstat gets all this wrong as it isn’t sure what it is because of its location on the drive. I remember that there was another program similar to windirstat that would show unknown files but can’t recall what it was called

good job! your monologue is just the right tempo, your visualizations are timely and clean, even your studio background is Technicolor! add to these your clear voice and good looks! and it's easy to justify your large subscriber base.

Well this was useful to know. Like I have a Laptop with almost 1TB of storage. And I saved about 200 GB or more by moving my games into a 4TB portable hard drive. I don't regret doing it, because I saved a lot of space. Since I have a lot of storage on the drive, I also moved my virtual machines there as well.

Interesting ! From my own experience : deleting old Unreal Engine projects and Unreal engine cache can save you Gbs. Also, if you use a video editing program, it will create a lot of temporairy media files that you can delete once the editing is done :)

2:42 "Yours probably isn't that big, but still, it might be bigger than you think." wise words.

Extremely helpful video. When it comes to personal computing, reclaiming space and garbage collection is not nearly talked about enough.

Son can i delete your 500GB Homework folder, my storage is low

thio is essentially creating a modern video documentation for advanced users, and i'm very grateful for it

WinDirStat is truly a blessing. I found out that some CNC machine programming software I use at work was eating up loads of space making and not deleting temporary files, and came up with a batch file that I run at log-in with Task Scheduler to delete any of those temporary files that are more than a few months old.

*Thank you so much for this! with WinDirStat, I've been able to clear about 80GB files that I had no idea they're hiding on my C drive. You're awesome!*

Hey, 5:40 that Disk Cleanup is super, I have many Disks I used on older Win instalations, and I probably sometimes left recyle bin full, and on new instance it is invisible, so 60GB on one disk just like that. Nice :D

Very, very helpful. Thank you.

You always deliver Joe ‼️

Good info. Thanks.

This is oddly specific but if you have plex, there is an option to enable thumbnails that appear when you mouse around the timeline (like how on YT you can do this if you mouse around the timeline on the video) this creates a huge amount of thumbnail images on your plex folder and can get really big really fast, especially for large plex databases. I ran into this problem randomly and it took a while to undo (didn't want to just randomly delete a plex subfolder in case i delete something i wanted to keep)

Oh! Sweet... This is very helpful...

3:40 I think it's pretty save to delete whole temp. I'm doing it since W95 and never got a problem. Actually used files can't be deleted anyway so it's safe to select all and delete it.

For those with lots of RAM, the windows pagefile will create a reserve near equal to the amount of ram you have. Same goes for the Hibernation file. So if you have 32GB of RAM, you might have a 32GB page file AND a 32GB hibernation file.

WinDirStat was a really good suggestion. It helped me to delete a Microsoft access database file i don't needed anymore what somehow had a size from 70GB i just deleted. I don't know why it took up so much space from my 125GB SSD i only use for Windows.

Great tips!!

WinDirStat helped me out so so much. i didnt know but FiveM was using 100 gigs and aslo a game i dont even have bc i refunded it on steam was like 100 gigs aswell. thanks bro

Thank you! ❤

thanks for this because my SSD is full once and now I know what to prevent a SSD to be full. thx for all your vids ilysm

I definitely needed this video. I was just in the red territory on my drive and have been searching for the cause.

Symlinks are great. I'm glad I know how to use them.

*As soon as I opened the comments section to comment it showed the guidelines of ThioJoe!!!* That's new and I felt it very useful for commenters, As they can never misunderstand any part of the video that you explained!!!! 🔥🔥🔥 PS: I think no one noticed that!!!

Thank you 😊❤️

Windows Store files download to C: by default you can change /move if you configure the "default download location of installed programs" (store apps) to another drive on the app list you can then move them too!

You can change the location for user(s) folder via registry in 'HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\ProfileList' So your user folder is not in 'c:\Users\' but in a different directory&partition. I'm not running all the services under 'NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM', i run some services under 'NT SERVICE\', example 'NT SERVICE\Apache2.4'. That means a user folder 'Apache2.4' is created. However i changed it that user folder to be under 'c:\Services\' instead of the default servicers user folder. You can do also other space saving changes to the partition where Windows is installed, but there is a risk factor as you will be touching registry entries and files that are important. I did not change any critical ones but the effect can be devastating like blank screen when loging in and resulting you need to fix the windows wiithout a gui interface you used to with mouse and click there and here. Happen once i needed to fix Windows by editing registry without mouse, just keyboard.

Damm perfect timing I only have 22.7 out of 222GB free (I only have a C drive)

There is something you forgot regarding this, which tends to happen a lot, hibernation files + page file system, if you for instance pair 16Gb+ of ram with a 120Gb ssd your disk space will dissapear awfully fast, i had seen this happen so many times... including myself, in which case its best to dissable hibernation and reduce the page file to about 4096- 8192 MB, i said reduce not dissable because while some people might get away with it, dissabling page file can lead to issues with different software and games, same is also the case for reducing the pagefile under 4096MB any less then that can cause issues as well with extended software usage.

Thanks for this video. Was annoyed about not being able to find where my boot drive (C) was losing so much storage space. Turns out I created a Virtual Machine for a project last year and forget that I allocated 190 GB for it. (Big Data learning project dont ask lol) To top that. I had manually turned off the indexing options to save on the disk space so it was taking super long to look for the virtual machine file. WinDirState showed me that big chunk of memoery being occupied. Right clicked on it and immediately moved that to my D drive.

god bless you for timestamps

Tbh the symlink is the best thing here, im running out of space in my main drive and a lot of stuff i have downloaded doesnt include a way to chose the install location, thank you

If you're someone who hangs on to your computer for a long time, you might experience a gradual nibbling of your free space even though you're actively managing your contents. Some time back, I discovered that my computer had multiple copies of system dll files in different winSXS folders. At the time, this appeared to be Microsoft's way of dealing with dll hell where applications required a certain version of a particular dll to function. As an application was upgraded and used a different version, the old dll wasn't deleted because other programs might still be using it. The advice Microsoft offered was that if you deleted one of the older copies, it might have no effect, or an application could lose some or all functions. As I said, the result of this was a small steady nibbling, rather that catastrophic loss. Since the cure could be worse than the disease, I just ignored it. Someone brighter than me probably found a solution.

You can also explore the files on your PC and see the storage with treesize

Some other things worth noting: Downloads Windows Update Folder CacheClip in your default videos folder if you are into video editing.

If you could do the same sort of analysis for main memory, I would be eternally (at least millennia) grateful. What fills memory on my system, without releasing it when I close all apps, seems to be in system memory, where attributing it to any one program is difficult. There are utilities that can free a bit of it, but over the course of a few days, I get to a point where I'm swapping all the time. Any help appreciated.

thanks for helping i found out why my storage wasnt going away. the recycling bin. im also going to delete every apps setup that i havnt even installed yet. i have all these random games that i havnt installed yet.

I love how your sponsor is not the same thing all over and sometimes I never thought that thing exist so its helpful, because sometimes I watch a video and there's a sponsor but it just the same thing from another vid in that channel, it just annoyed me so much. I honestly love ads and sponsor lol, because I am too lazy reading articles to find things and rather finding it accidentically. Gonna give guardio a try! Because sometimes my antivirus didnt detect that lol

For the iPhone users, who also uses iTunes, it can be a good idea to look the old saves of your iphone, it adds up and can take a lot of place in your HD ;) (I already had the problem…)

something of note i think is that programs you Uninstall leave their folders in appdata even if the apps themselves are gone. they can accumulate over time too

You should also have mentioned the windows.old folder which contains old versions of windows. This folder gets created after you upgrade to a new version of Windows.

As linux user, the most significant cause of full storage is: sudo dd if=sdcard.img of=sdb Note that it supposed to be /dev/sdb, not sdb

Still waiting for that video on TOR, I know it will be great!

Thought he'd talk about that weird windows bug when you create a large file the disk you putt it on wouldn't report the right used space value, like copiing a 10GB file onto your D:/ drive but the driver says it took 40GB, but fixes itself when you reboot.

what is the file manager does ThioJoe use？

Other causes I hate are programs that create duplicates of files in temporary directories that the user doesn't normally know about and that serve no purpose. These include files extracted from compressed archives using certain archive programs such as WinRAR, and files migrated from a guest virtual machine to the host system such as with VirtualBox.

Thanks, you help me

Treesize is a banger program too, I think it might be a bit faster from what I've heard(?)

I was using duplicati to backup my drives to webdav for megasync. All the files that were created were being stored in the temp folder in C. My 2tb nvme ssd was trying to store about 5 tb of data in the temp folder

It's like the universe is trying to tell me something

I have a habit of downloading everything I like from RU-vid onto my laptop. (Love my RU-vid downloader!) It eats up memory fast! I have to remember to move the MP4s off to one of my external hard drives so I can delete them. I've grabbed whole series' worth of episodes before RU-vid deletes them.

Also system page files ,that will take up space. My device had a page file size of 7gigs

On a different topic, what brand and model of security key is good enough for you to allow its maker to sponsor one of your videos?

5:05 what is that that your using?

Hold shift then press delete then press enter. Shortest way for your files that you want to delete are not GOING to recycle bin.

I bought a 2tb Samsung ssd and at the moment it just feels so good.

Have you done everything on Windows 8.1, I have an old Gateway I think that's ASUS. Thanks Dave Subbed 👍

WinDirStat is the best piece of software ever written I swear I've been using it for so many years and it's just as good as the first time.

Oh. Got a glimse of Xamarin! Could you please make tutorials for xamarin coding?

Hey joe recently one of my laptop's system drives failed or stopped working and i had to reset my pc and start afresh as in reinstall almost everything (factory reset) i do not know what caused this or how i could have fixed it can you give me some advice on that matter

Guys! System restore also takes up huge amount of space, you can delete them if you want some space.

Hey thio I just bought a laptop from someone and he forgot to format it but when I search in the folders and I found nothing but my space is still full and I installed cc cleaner it says all the space is full but when I try to delete the files it shows me and error and it won't delete the files

Game is massive to download, not going to uninstall if I ever intend to play again. If not ready to play yet I will download in advance.

I loved to use symlinks, until I tried to move folders that had them scattered around and then the moving or syncing processes got stuck.

That's Good!

Could you make a tutorial on how to remove files with ilegal names on windows? I accidebtly extracted some files from very old java code and now I've got aux.xx files stuck on my computer.

You can also install deep freeze. It wont save anything after you restart your PC. Not unless you disable it.

Another thing that may take lot of space are Minecraft worlds, if you make too many of them

Also the restore point always occupies a lot of storage we can delete them and create new one.

1:52 Using this software is good but if you have a 16 tb storage device and some files took 30gb we cannot actually find that easily

Cloud is best for backup datas. Even internet checks for storage.

Docker. If you do any development with docker it quickly eats up more and more space until you prune it

If you have an AMD graphics card, your AMD folder in the C drive could take a lot of space, it's all just old installers

is there a firefox extension as well ?

Once my computer storage is full. I just delete some temp file and empty the recycle bin. It doesnt really work actually.. But after I use my computer for sometimes and ignore that, I check again and it's not full again lol (although the space still small)

So what I do to save my precious 64gig hdd is to cut every files in the downloads folder and paste it to an external hard drive so that I can reinstall my necessary apps and files whenever I need. Pro tip turn off file history if it is taking too much space.

Hey, can you make a video how to fix the sudden frame loss in a middle of a game? It never happened to me before but surely lately

Ahh I just remembered the installer folder that made my day very bad at work

Who gets rid of games after beating them? Most people replay them.

When you said "clean and secure" it sounded like you said "clean insecure" lol

Speaking of storage, there's something in my computer that i haven't been able to explain, i lose space on the C drive every now and then due to things i can't identify, but when i launch the CHKDSK command, i immediatly gain it back, keep in mind that sometimes i have to use the command 2 or 3 times ! any ideas ?

Thanks for the video, my 10 year old 64 GB SSD kept filling up for no reason at all

virtual memory can also take huge space

Hi, can you help me, I have 111 gb C drive SSD with a total of 68.5 gb used space showing in Windstat which should have 42.5 gb free space, but my PC is only showing 11 gb free so where can the 31.5 gb be at.Thanks.

What I've encountered is the disk allocation error, corrected by . . . CHKDSK C: /F

You probably have battlefield installed. Immediately maxes out your hard drive regardless of size.

i have 300gb in use but cant find which program is using this how can i find it???

I expect a kali linux course from this guy .

I once had my OS SSD full for some reason, So I scanned It and it showed a big chunk that was literally 150GB of NOTHING… but it fixed itself after the scan, so yay?

How do you have tabs in file explorer

my C drive is full because there is a lot of softwares that don't allow you to pick the install location, which is annoying because I have TBs of free space on many other drives...