You might be asking yourself, “How is my hard drive disk full?” or “Where is most of the space of my hard drive being stored?”
I had been struggling with one of my computers with this very point for a long time. I had a whole routine worked out to keep my hard drive space from totally maxing out of space. I would do this routine about once a week. I would free up about 1 GB of space and then it would fill up again. Sometimes it would get so low that I couldn’t even browse websites or open programs! That’s when you really have zero space.
Recently, I became fed up with this routine and took extra time to do some research and dig deep to find out where all my space was being used up. My computer was starting to feel like a train in India at rush hour.
It really shocked me when I finally found a couple areas I had not been able to see before. Follow the below steps to find out where your hard drive space is being used up.
- Download TreeSize – this software is very easy to use and gives you a complete break down of your whole hard drive and where the space is being used up. For me the space that I didn’t know was there being used was in a folder called App Data, located at c/Users/Me/App Data
- Make sure you have the show hidden files and folders checked on your computer so that you are viewing everything. This is where I had been blind for years on this one computer. This is a default setting on computers. To change this to see everything follow this link for instructions: https://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/05/29/cant-see-the-appdata-folder/
- Delete any unnecessary files. For me I found over 10 GB of Firefox crash reports over a 8 year period of time. This added up to more than 250,000 junk files that I didn’t even know was there clogging up my hard drive.
I would preform disk cleanups regularly and these files never came up.
Doing a yearly maintenance on your computer is always a good habit, and the above steps for finding all the junk files should be apart of that maintenance.
If you need help with your computer because it has maxed it’s hard drive and you don’t know why, give me a call!