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I started seeing warnings to free up disk space on my C: past week or so. My C: has 2TB of available SSD NVMe storage total.

  1. I have done a couple of emergency relocations for Steam games and such like this, but it is still happening.
  2. I tried looking into Google Chrome for temp files, maybe some of its data mining sharing policies and so forth, helped a little bit, still it is happening.
  3. I tried running WinDirStat to see if I couldn't isolate where the issue might be contained, to no obvious avail. In fact, there is a mystery there, in visible (or invisible) files, there is not more than 500GB of obvious OS, programs, data, and so forth. Curious, when I check Show Unknown in the Options, a likely culprit appears, a 1.3+TB unknown file.

I wonder if possibly this is Windows 10 telling me I should run some pending updates, which there are. I run W10 Professional, and I like to police those, I have also not run them in a scant while, so I wonder if there are shadow copy snapshots going on that maybe shouldn't be. Still for the consumption that I am seeing, seems rather aggressive for W10 to be chewing up that much space so quickly if you ask me.

Is that what it is, possibly, System Restore being "too helpful" as it were? Any insights?

Michael W. Powell
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    I can't find the proper post that this is a copy of but there is a great one that has SO MANY TOOLS listed. I did see you write an answer that wasn't an answer in another post. I myself use [this](http://www.steffengerlach.de/freeware/) tool called "scanner" that dates *WAY* BACK. It is the easiest way (for me) to show WHERE the space went. Run it as administrator or it won't see many things. Know that it isn't smart enough to manage soft/hard links or junctions (those will show up as many times as the links exist) but those won't be the problem you are trying to solve. – Señor CMasMas Feb 03 '22 at 04:36
  • _Do_ you have a large amount of VSS snapshots? Have you checked `vssadmin list shadows` or tried deleting them via `cleanmgr`'s 2nd tab? – u1686_grawity Feb 03 '22 at 06:36
  • @user1686 Appreciate the response, I do not appear to have any shadows. There is one provider, and the storage associated appears to be small, certainly not `1.3+TB`! – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 14:46
  • @SeñorCMasMas Appreciate the response, Scanner looks like a variation on a similar `WinDirStat` theme, with a fancy charting visual. I am happy with `WDS` at the moment, but thank you. Any other helpful insights, feel free to chime in however. Thank you. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 14:49
  • I had issues with Windows 10 showing wrong disk usage, if compression is enabled. I had to disable it finally, and everything went back to normal. – davidbaumann Feb 03 '22 at 14:51
  • @davidbaumann Appreciate the response, it doesn't seem like a compression thing; I verified that option is not checked on my C: whatsoever that I am aware of. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 14:55
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    WinDirStat has some major failings, it's a great program, but in my experience isn't as helpful as WizTree. However, in my experience, this amount of space is almost always used by the Shadow Volume. A screenshot with WizTree running as an Administrator would be helpful – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 15:41
  • @Ramhound To reiterate, I probed the VSS details, does not show any volumes, certainly not any 1.3+TB growing file. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 15:49
  • @MichaelW.Powell - It could be orphaned. But I can't debug your issue with the information provided – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 16:44
  • @Ramhound Orphaned? From what? I don't think so; it has been actively consuming the drive space, especially the past couple of days in which I have noticed and warnings started popping up. For God knows how long before that, probably continually. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 16:46
  • Like I said I have to literally see what WinDirStat and WizTree is indicating the space is used by to provide a full explanation – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 16:50

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Okay here is more of a clue thank you to @Ramhound for the WizTree lead. I do like it, they both have their pros cons compared contrasted with WinDirStat of course. Anyway, neither here nor there.

Showing a possible memory dump (literally, .dmp) file (?) connected with Microsoft SQL Server (?) polybase (?). I don't know what any of that is, but I need to find out and 86 it ASAP.

I think, tentatively conclusively, can say this was due to MSSQL PolyBase creating dump after dump. Not sure why, or whether they are/were even that necessary.

Just for the time being turned the services to Manual activation, and if necessary to Disabled. Barring that, will need to investigate more severe counter-measures, i.e. removing MSSQL features from the installed instance(s), or more. But I hesitate to do that because it typically ends up breaking something else inadvertently in the process.

Michael W. Powell
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  • With [link](https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/334078/polybase-issue-about-continuous-producing-of-dump.html) to potentially known issue. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 15:53
  • Microsoft SQL Server could have potentially been installed if you installed Visual Studio. – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 16:46
  • That is possible thank you @Ramhound. I am looking into the MSSQL issue, minimally disable to PolyBase, but if I can remove MSSQL altogether, that. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 16:49
  • You only need MSSQL if you are developing software that uses it. It's not required by any software unless you have installed software that requires it. – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 16:51
  • @Ramhound Yes, of course; periodically I do, or MySQL, or postgresql, etc. But why I need a memory dump from polybase, no. That's a non-starter, obviously. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 17:00
  • I would first patch Polybase then just delete the files that were generated. – Ramhound Feb 03 '22 at 17:02
  • Well, first, I stopped the `PolyBase` services (if they were started at all), they were `Automatic` turned them to `Manual`, for starters, and I may `Disable` them outright. Then, like you said, deleted the dumps and other logs entirely. Gained the `1.3+TB` back again. Voila. Will take more severe actions like removing features or products etc if necessary after that. – Michael W. Powell Feb 03 '22 at 19:23
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Here I will be sharing with you some of the things that you may do to clean up the disk space :

  1. Try to empty your recycle Bin.

  2. Disk Cleanup

Windows has a built-in disk cleanup utility, aptly named Disk Cleanup, which can help you clear up space by removing various files -- including temporary internet files, system error memory dump files, and even previous Windows installations that may still be hanging around. You can find Disk Cleanup in the Start menu under Windows Administrative Tools > Disk Cleanup or you can just search for it. Select the file types you want to delete -- from Downloaded Program Files to Thumbnails -- and hit OK.

  1. Turn on Storage Sense You can automate some of this cleanup by heading back to the Storage page in Settings and toggling on Storage Sense. You can set it so Windows automatically deletes unused temporary files, as well as files that have been in the Recycle Bin and Downloads folder for more than a day or up to 60 days. You can also choose to move local files of your PC to the cloud via OneDrive if they haven't been opened for a specified period of time. I'm pretty good about emptying the Recycle Bin on something approaching a regular schedule, but I'm also very happy to have Windows track down and eradicate needless temp files and old downloads.

  2. Save files to a different drive

If your computer has multiple hard drives or a partitioned hard drive, you may find yourself running out of space on one drive (or partition). Luckily, you can fix this by changing your default save locations for apps, documents, music, pictures, and videos. To do this, open the Settings menu and go to System > Storage and click the link at the bottom for Change where new content is saved. You can select a partition or a drive -- even a removable drive, like a USB flash drive or a memory card -- that is connected to your PC to save files for categories including apps, documents, music, photos, and movies.

  1. Disable hibernate

Instead of shutting down your computer completely, you can put it in hibernate, a quasi-shut-down state that allows the computer to start up faster. When your computer goes into hibernate, it saves a snapshot of your files and drivers before shutting down, and this takes up space. If starting up quickly isn't your priority, you can reclaim some valuable hard drive space by disabling hibernate altogether, because of the hiberfil.sys file can take up gigs of drive space.

Click the Start button and search for Command Prompt. Right-click Command Prompt at the top of the search results and select Run as administrator. In the Command Prompt window, enter: powercfg /hibernate off and then hit Enter.

  1. Uninstall apps You probably have some apps and programs on your PC that you don't use -- either app you've installed and forgotten about, or bloatware that came preinstalled on your computer from the manufacturer.

Or you can check out this link for more information: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/free-up-drive-space-in-windows-85529ccb-c365-490d-b548-831022bc9b32

Andrew wilson
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