
- #Windirstat unknown files install
- #Windirstat unknown files software
- #Windirstat unknown files free
- #Windirstat unknown files windows
In that latter case run a file system check and the problems should be fixed afterwards. Also in the very unlikely case that your file system is corrupt there may be a non-zero sized “” item.
#Windirstat unknown files software
There also have been reports that some third-party software stores data there, but I cannot confirm this. I personally turned this feature of since I have a different backup strategy – however, this may not apply to everyone, so you’ll have to live with the “” item :mrgreen. I tried disk cleanup, Ccleaner, O&O defrag, Paragon partition manager, run chkdsk /f after reboot, disabled hibernation, deleted all Rescue and Recovery backups, run chkdsk /f again after reboot, tried to. WinDirStat tells me of some 29 GB of unknown space in my boot partition. The contents are a dump of the registry at the time the SRP was taken and of relevant files (usually from the system folders). Adding all the files and folder sizes adds only to some 51 gb. The biggest portion is usually being taken up by the System Restore Points (SRPs) you can create (or that are automatically created by software installers). I re-ran WinDirStat as admin and the Unknown files is empty. I believe that WinDirStat is reporting this because it sees a block of data used, but it cant access it to report on it. Now what is stored in this directory? If you could gain SYSTEM access (and I will not tell you how that is possible …), you would see that the system keeps some binary log files there, but these take up only a small portion of what is stored in there. I discovered that the issue with the Unknown files is likely to occur in TreeSize too if its not run as administrator. And by the way, we have had reports of up to 30 GB of “” space. My second drive (a 1 TB HDD) even shows several hundred GB as unknown.
#Windirstat unknown files free
disabled WinDirStat showing 78.5 GB of data, 31.7 GB of and 1.7 GB of free space Tresize showing 78.5 GB of data and 1.7 GB of free space. WDS cannot access the files under System Volume Information on all the (NTFS?) drives, so it cannot sum up the sizes of these items. The drive is a 120GB SSD (showing 111.8 GB in windows) with shadow copies etc. Please note the part WDS can access! This is the important point here.
#Windirstat unknown files windows
This mysterious item is just the difference between what Windows reports as the free space on the volume minus size of the files WDS can access. Sometimes it’s an huge amount of space! like 700 or more MB ! i think it could be the “system volume information” but! what mysterous things are within this space? he he he! I think it would be nice to put in the faq or in help or in some docs what’s in the space I did not see this fix in other places, so I hope that it help someone else.WDS shows a certain item labelled “” and recently someone posted a comment asking for details:
#Windirstat unknown files install
However, after it completed, I had regained the 50 GB on my SSD, which was required to install other MS bloatware that only install on drive C. Windows actually does not move the file, but deletes it and recreates it, so if it is a large 50 GB, it will take at least 30 min to move. I went to the control panel and under index, I was able to move this index to the harddrive and get it off the SSD. It was my 1 TB harddrive index that was stored on drive C:, which was still occupying the space. By opening up the folders manually in windows explorer, I could regain permission to view them and Windowdirstat would recognize them again. I did not recover the space but now the search folder became an unknown file in Windirstat. (Indices on the SSD will wear them out faster, because of the write operations every time a file is changed ). I had turned the windows indexing on for drive C:, which is a mistake for SSDs, so I turned it off. Windirstat indicated that the problem was in c:\progdata\microsoft\search. I just solved this problem, my SSD was completely filled and I could not account for the space. Just wanted to throw this out here for anyone else that gets hit by this Norton backup issue. I’ve identified all the files and the space they’re consuming and a Shift-Del is running, but we’ll have to see how much of it is actually removed. I think I got it worked out by removing the read only attribute from the parent and pushing it down, but Windows Explorer kept dying on me and I don’t know if this completed (I’d left it running over night). cacls wasn’t running recursively, so I was getting parents but not children in the file system. This was compounded by the fact that the entire directory was inaccessible to me as the admin user. I thought I had turned this off (backing up C to C is bad, after all) but wasn’t routinely reviewing it, and 2 million files later I had under 19G free on a 500G drive. I’ve used this tool to identify and clean up restore points in the past, but ran into this again with over 100G in Unknown space with no restore points or shadow copies.Ī little digging around and I isolated this to a backup from the Comcast provided Norton Security Suite that was being written to my local C drive, in a directory named C:\N360_BACKUP.
