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hagakure.s81
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Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 7:09 pm

Hi all, first time posting here, thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

This is all to do with my work PC, and photoshop CS6. The PC is not very powerful at all, was gonna post CPUiD info below, but I can't post links so i'll have to just tell you the basic specs and ask if you need additional info.
CPU: AMD A6-5400B APU with Radeon(tm) HD Graphics, 3600 Mhz, 1 Core(s), 2 Logical Processor(s)
RAM: DDR3 4Gb (Single) 798.4 MHz (1:8)
GPU: AMD Radeon HD 7540D
O/S: Windows 10, 64-bit

At the start of this problem I had 1 SSD installed, a Samsung SSD 750 EVO 250GB

Background: I've been working with a rather large file in photoshop, around 1GB in size.
The hard drive C:\ was nearly full, but had around 8-9GB of free space (this morning was once around 14GB free but that disappeared somehow). When I open the file in Photoshop, try to flatten the image and save it as a .pdf the space in the hard drive would start getting chewed up, down to around 250mb, whereupon Photoshop would tell me ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ and the .pdf file would fail to be created.
Close photoshop, maybe restart and I would have the 8-9GB of free hard drive space available again.

Now I knew there was a spare 40GB SSD hard drive (INTEL SSDSA2CT040G3) lying about in our server room that had been taken out of someone's computer at some point. So I put that in my PC, and I changed the windows paging file to be set to this hard drive D:\, and disabling the paging file on C:\
To free up a little space, I also placed the working .psd file on this new SSD.
Still, photoshop was unable to create the file.
So I looked into photoshops files and found you can also change photoshops scratch file location, so I did that and set it to be located on D:\ also.
When I tried to save the .psd to a flattened .pdf, sucess! File created, all is well in the world.... except....

Now, when I look at my PC, all the hard drive space that was there before (the 8-9gb) is suddenly gone. C:\ showed only around 800mb available.
The Windows paging file (which shouldn't be doing anything currently) is still located on D:\, as is photoshops scratch file.
I ran disk cleanups (windows) and also checked the purge option in photoshop, to see if there was a cache to clear, but all options under ../edit/purge were greyed out so I have to assume with no file open its automatically cleared that.
After all that it still only shows around 1.2gb of hard drive space available.
I've restarted and shut down the PC, still no change in free space.

So what happened to the other 7-8gb?
Can anyone help me understand this?

I do understand I could have originally worked with a smaller file in photoshop, but its a little beside the point - I just would like to know what happened to the 8gb of hard drive space that was shown to be available before, but isn't now.
 
meerkt
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 7:30 pm

Welcome.

Use Voidtools' Everything to index all files, then sort by modification date to find recent files, or by file size.

I also like SpaceSniffer for a bird's eye overview.
 
bthylafh
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 7:41 pm

I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.
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hagakure.s81
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 7:44 pm

Thanks so much, you solved it in no time.
2 minutes after I downloaded Everything and ran it I found 1 file in \appdata\local\temp of around 6.7gb titled Photoshop_temp###
In the same fold location were 2 other files, total around 29Gb

So safe to say I should be able to delete these without problems?

edit: also tried this spacesniffer program you both recommended and found an iTunes folder with 8gb in it. For the life of me I don't ever remember connecting an iPhone to this PC (haven't even had one in years) so where the heck that came from idk... Thank you both.
 
LoneWolf15
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:06 pm

bthylafh wrote:
I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.


TreeSizeFree is what I use now. Used to use WinDirStat.
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Waco
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:15 pm

bthylafh wrote:
I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.

Really? I've found WinDirStat to be pretty damn fast on SSDs/SSD arrays/NVMe drives. I'll poke at SpaceSniffer (just downloaded it) and it doesn't seem to be any faster at scanning initially...

EDIT: Okay, I just raced them. WinDirStat took 1m2s to scan my C: drive. SpaceSniffer is at 42% and it's been 5 minutes...

EDIT2: Just over 7 minutes total for SpaceSniffer. Am I missing something?
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Usacomp2k3
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:41 pm

LoneWolf15 wrote:
bthylafh wrote:
I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.


TreeSizeFree is what I use now. Used to use WinDirStat.

Same here.
 
bfg-9000
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:50 pm

Clearly, OP still has a scratch disk set on C: if files are still being written there. Photoshop is supposed to delete the temp files on program close, but has been pretty bad about doing so since Vista--perhaps because of a permissions issue?

It's probably just as well to leave the 1st scratch on the C:\ SSD, as in Win10 I have never been able to set the primary scratch disk in Photoshop CS6 to anything besides C:\ (or a Ramdisk), or the program will always fail to launch the next time because of a permissions issue. This requires starting again with CTRL and ALT depressed to select new scratch disks. How the heck are you all getting away with this?
 
bthylafh
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 8:51 pm

Waco wrote:
bthylafh wrote:
I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.

Really? I've found WinDirStat to be pretty damn fast on SSDs/SSD arrays/NVMe drives. I'll poke at SpaceSniffer (just downloaded it) and it doesn't seem to be any faster at scanning initially...

EDIT: Okay, I just raced them. WinDirStat took 1m2s to scan my C: drive. SpaceSniffer is at 42% and it's been 5 minutes...

EDIT2: Just over 7 minutes total for SpaceSniffer. Am I missing something?


Dunno, but every machine I've tried it on, SpaceSniffer has taken maybe a third of the time to check disk usage vs. WDS. I've got a lot of computers with spinning rust at my day job, so maybe that accounts for it.
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morphine
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 9:01 pm

WizTree is what i ditched WinDirStat for. Faster and the UI is just better.
There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(
 
Yan
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 9:11 pm

WizTree's output seems ugly to me, for some reason. I much prefer Space Sniffer.
 
Waco
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jun 27, 2019 9:57 pm

bthylafh wrote:

Dunno, but every machine I've tried it on, SpaceSniffer has taken maybe a third of the time to check disk usage vs. WDS. I've got a lot of computers with spinning rust at my day job, so maybe that accounts for it.

Ah, I don't have much spinning rust to check on besides my NAS. Time for a race. :)

EDIT: Yep, it's significantly faster on standard HDDs. I bet it's because WinDirStat does a multithreaded walk that forces drive seeks on HDDs whereas it appears that SpaceSniffer decents in dirent order and can benefit from streaming-style metadata lookups (yes, I have written treewalk code before :P ).
Victory requires no explanation. Defeat allows none.
 
morphine
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Fri Jun 28, 2019 12:21 pm

Just tried Space Sniffer. As it apparently was reaching the end of its scan of C:, "Abnormal program termination". Oh well!
There is a fixed amount of intelligence on the planet, and the population keeps growing :(
 
arunphilip
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 4:05 am

meerkt wrote:
I also like SpaceSniffer for a bird's eye overview.

I've been a TreeSize user thus far, thank you for pointing me towards another alternative.
 
DPete27
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:20 pm

Have you used Windows' "disk cleanup" utility? You get the big gains (10s of GB) by selecting "clean up system files" which removes all the garbage that windows update creates when it does its thing.
Main: i5-3570K, ASRock Z77 Pro4-M, MSI RX480 8G, 500GB Crucial BX100, 2 TB Samsung EcoGreen F4, 16GB 1600MHz G.Skill @1.25V, EVGA 550-G2, Silverstone PS07B
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Usacomp2k3
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:49 pm

DPete27 wrote:
Have you used Windows' "disk cleanup" utility? You get the big gains (10s of GB) by selecting "clean up system files" which removes all the garbage that windows update creates when it does its thing.

I run that monthly on both my work laptop and also home desktop. First with the regular interface, then again with the "clean up system files"
 
anotherengineer
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 2:41 pm

win10 and the 6 month service pack (update) adds lots to windows install files

you can try c:drive-right click-properties - disk clean up - when it pops up and runs, click on clean up system files and run again.

On one pc it was 7GB of space
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Yan
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 4:47 pm

In spite of some controversy about the program, I still like CCleaner, with CCEnhancer, to remove unneeded files.

It can be a good idea to add additional temporary directories (such as \appdata\local\temp mentioned by the OP) to the list of directories cleared.

The cookie cleaner, which lets you choose what cookies to remove and what cookies to keep, is especially useful, in my opinion.

However, I don't like the "monitoring" feature, and the registry cleaner is not only useless, but even dangerous, as are all registry cleaners.

Because of the controversy, some users prefer to stay with version 5.40, which you can get from File Hippo. If you decide to do so, disable automatic updates and set your firewall to block connections by CCUpdate.exe.
 
LostCat
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 6:14 pm

Yan wrote:
In spite of some controversy about the program, I still like CCleaner, with CCEnhancer, to remove unneeded files.

I don't really see the point with Storage Sense on win10.

ccleaner was a little too forward about deleting things I actually wanted to keep...not a bad program overall, but eh
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bthylafh
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sat Jun 29, 2019 7:29 pm

For file-deleting needs there's also BleachBit. n.b.: it's ported over from Linux and like many such tools, will help you aim at your foot and offer you a drink to steady your nerves.
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blitzy
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sun Jun 30, 2019 1:21 am

another handy program for this is Sequoiaview https://www.win.tue.nl/sequoiaview/
Pretty old, but still works last time I tried it. It's quite good for visualizing where large chunks of file data is stored
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sun Jun 30, 2019 1:30 am

Love this thread. So many useful utilities. Here's my find:

Scanner

"A Sharper Scaling" on that page could be quite useful for upscaling those pesky tiny images one might run into from time to time.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Sun Jun 30, 2019 2:21 am

StepTree looks kinda fun and interesting.
 
LoneWolf15
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Tue Jul 02, 2019 7:41 pm

Waco wrote:
bthylafh wrote:
I also endorse both the programs meerkt listed. People used to recommend WinDirStat but SpaceSniffer is so very much faster.

Really? I've found WinDirStat to be pretty damn fast on SSDs/SSD arrays/NVMe drives. I'll poke at SpaceSniffer (just downloaded it) and it doesn't seem to be any faster at scanning initially...

EDIT: Okay, I just raced them. WinDirStat took 1m2s to scan my C: drive. SpaceSniffer is at 42% and it's been 5 minutes...

EDIT2: Just over 7 minutes total for SpaceSniffer. Am I missing something?


Did you run WinDirStat as admin?

If you don't, you'll miss a lot of files that are hidden/system attributes.
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Waco
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Wed Jul 03, 2019 7:36 am

LoneWolf15 wrote:
Did you run WinDirStat as admin?

If you don't, you'll miss a lot of files that are hidden/system attributes.

Neither were run as admin.
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qmacpoint
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Wed Jul 03, 2019 9:44 am

Igor_Kavinski wrote:
"A Sharper Scaling" on that page could be quite useful for upscaling those pesky tiny images one might run into from time to time.

This note on the sharper scaling tool is a bit scary:

When I try to run the installer, there's a malware alert from my security software or operating system. What does that mean? ››› Yes, that's because it's an obscure binary downloaded from the Internet. From the security point of view, such file is dangerous. You have to decide whether you trust me or not.
 
Yan
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Wed Jul 03, 2019 11:00 am

Microsoft's silly SmartScreen warns you if you're downloading an uncommon file. That's why some authors have started to distribute single files in zip format, because SmartScreen doesn't warn about uncommon zip files.

If you're concerned, check the file with Virus Total.

Edit: I've just checked the file with Virus Total and one scanner out of 67 finds it suspicious. It's safe to assume the 66 other scanners are correct and Trapmine (of which I've never heard before) is wrong.
 
Igor_Kavinski
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Re: Help me understand where my hard drive space has gone...?

Thu Jul 04, 2019 1:13 am

qmacpoint wrote:
Igor_Kavinski wrote:
"A Sharper Scaling" on that page could be quite useful for upscaling those pesky tiny images one might run into from time to time.

This note on the sharper scaling tool is a bit scary:

When I try to run the installer, there's a malware alert from my security software or operating system. What does that mean? ››› Yes, that's because it's an obscure binary downloaded from the Internet. From the security point of view, such file is dangerous. You have to decide whether you trust me or not.


German humor. He probably chuckled to himself while writing that and probably still finds it amusing that there are people out there NOT using his useful software because they decided not to trust him.

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