SOLVED WinDirStat and Windows Explorer disk usage stats extremely different

[sanderwebs]

Hi all!
I'm currently on a PC with a 250GB SSD (Samsung EVO850 M.2). Recently my PC suddenly was out of storage and I wondered why, since I though I still had at least half of the storage free.

So I decided to run WinDirStat to figure out which directories were taking up all the space. As you can see in the screenshot it shows completely different values for the used space by the C drive. For your info, I only have a C drive, no second disk or second partition.

Does anybody have a clue what might be going on here?

 

[Alan Sh]

Have you tried:
a) running Chkdsk?
b) deleting all temporary files

Alan

 

[sanderwebs]

Hey Alan,
Thanks for responding!
On your advice I just ran chkdsk which found 0 errors and C-cleaner, which removed about 130 MB of temporary files. So it didn't really improve much haha

Sander

 

[Alan Sh]

Humm - I could have sworn chkdsk would have found some lost clusters. But then my knowledge of disk structures is a bit out of date.

Over to the experts.

 

[sanderwebs]

Okay, well thanks for trying to help out anyway!

 

[Trouble]

From the options item in the menu bar in WinDirStat
Select "Show freespace" and "Show Unknown"

 

[sanderwebs]

Hi! You were spot on. WinDirStat shows my missing GB's under "unknown". Any idea what might be the cause of something like that?

 

[Trouble]

Nope... although I'm not that familiar with the utility.
I'm just glad to hear that the information between file explorer and WinDirStat add up and make sense now.

 

[Snuffy]

since it is a SSD - delete all tmp, temp files, Windows saves lots of them,
also command prompt dfrgui to trim, you might also open my pc, C:\ properties of SSD and clean disk.

 

[sanderwebs]

I found the issue. I ran a different tool called TreeSize (as administrator, so it also tracks hidden files) and apparently some redis files are huge for whatever reason. So I deleted them successfully. I was only semi-successful in deleting redis itself, since chocolatey didn't feel like removing it because "it was already removed", though I could clearly see it in my chocolatey lib folder. So I removed all other redis related packages and stopped the redis-server process that was running in the background.

I have my lost GB's back for now and redis-server is not running in the background anymore even after a reboot, so let's hope redis keeps it's hands off of my dear GB's in the future haha.

Thanks for the help everybody!