Hard drive filling up but with what?

[Peter Prendergast]

My C drive when I first loaded every bit of software needed had a gigantic amount of space left. Out of 460 GB I think I used
maybe
15 GB. Over time, however, the drive now has 265 GB full of someting. I do not know what. I have deleted all the logs
which amounted to nothing really. Does anyone have an idea on how to identify what it is that is eating up that
hard drive? Images are pulled off all the time, so they aren't it.

Is their perhaps a back up of the drive happening via windows 10 enterprise addition? This is the Primalsuce
computer so their is no bloat ware on board.

Any ideas welcome.
Peter

[Dick Berg]

Hi Peter,

Go here https://windirstat.net/ and download the Windows version. I have been using this free tool for many years. Installing it. When you run it, it will show you exactly the amount of space everything uses, and you should be able to identify where the bloat is coming from.

[Peter Prendergast]

Hi Peter,

Go here https://windirstat.net/ and download the Windows version. I have been using this free tool for many years. Installing it. When you run it, it will show you exactly the amount of space everything uses, and you should be able to identify where the bloat is coming from.

ok got it. It’s windows that’s the issue. Something called, a file that is,
wondows.edb it’s huge what is that???here is a screen shot

[Peter Prendergast]

ok got it. It’s windows that’s the issue. Something called, a file that is,
wondows.edb it’s huge what is that???here is a screen shot

OK, its windows file, its an index of SEARCH results for goodness sakes.
Now I'm back to using 15 GB total.
I read on the internet on how to delete it and I have, whoa what a bloat hog.
I need to clean it out of my other computers its killing one of them

Thanks Dick

Peter

[Dick Berg]

Hi Peter, How nice that you could find this! You can actually delete files right there in WinDirStat. Did you find out if there was something specific that was driving the indexing - something you could do without?

[Peter Prendergast]

Hi Peter, How nice that you could find this! You can actually delete files right there in WinDirStat. Did you find out if there was something specific that was driving the indexing - something you could do without?

I checked every other computer and none had a file anywhere as large as that one. Once deleted I had tons of room again.

I could not determine why that file grew as it did.

I didn’t delete it directly from the utility as I had to go into services.msi and **** down Microsoft search. That closed the file allowing it to be deleted

thanks again!!!
Peter

[Bob Denny]

Haha your typo on "shut" got turned into "****" by the forum software.

[Eric Dose]

But it's just the past tense of "shut", right?

Oh no, that's why I get those funny looks...

[Dick Berg]

Hi Peter,

I just ran into the same issue - a 365 GB Windows.edb file on a 500 GB drive. What with all the other stuff on the drive, there was a mere 1.4 GB free space that prevented an update from running.

I found that this recipe worked well for me (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/...ndows-server-2):

• Go to Settings.
• In the search box at the top, type indexing options.
• Select Indexing Options at the bottom.
• Click on Advanced.
• Select Rebuild on the Indexing Settings tab.
• Click OK to confirm.

This will stop the Search service, delete the huge file, restart the Search service, and rebuild the indexing file anew. Mine went back down to 180 MB. It will grow as time goes by, I guess, but it took many, many years to get to 365 GB.

[Bob Denny]

Hi Dick - Thanks very much for this info!!