Home Forums Discussions General Discussion HD Cleanup

Ok, now don't you guys laugh at me. Well, don't laugh too hard. I actually ran out of hard drive space. Oh, how big is your hard drive? (no bad jokes now). I looked and it said around 150 GB.

I hear you laughing now! Well,remember, its 2-3 years old. It seemed alot at the time.

Well, I'm wondering what I have thats sucking up 100 GB of space? I don't have THAT many programs. Or things stored (i dont think). Yes, backing up AC the other day used my last 13 gigs. I ahve 13 free now. But I'd like to see what's taking up so much space. Is there a quick way to find out?

This is tangential, but do a search for *.tmp [for temporary files].

Deleting unused tmp files is good in a variety of ways, and you may find some large files along the way.

Couple of other suggestions:

<1> Check your download directory, and throw away downloads you no longer need; if you have large installers there you may be suprised how much space this saves you.

<2> Go through your installed software (Add/Remove Programs), and uninstall software that you no longer use.

Curious to see how much space you gain back.

oh, i had alredy gone through the installed programs. Didn't get that much. Most of the space taht I've recovered was by deleting a backup of AC (13 Gb, it included the imported items folder). I have another old copy from Jan that's 10 GB and I'm going to kill that too. That will leave the one from Friday.

There's also alot of old backups .mdb files from 2008. And some "PreTune, PreMigrate" files I think can go.

Hmmm. Lotta .tmp files from 2008 and 2009. if its a tmp file, that sounds like "by definition" I don't need it anymore, huh?

I suddenly have 70GB of free hard drive space. Nothing that I deleted appeared to be very large, other than the 13GB AC Backup file.

Now if I could only get so lucky on my laptop.

If the *.tmp files are around after the machine has been restarted, they are typically no longer needed. Tmp files are generally generated during a file operation where data in memory, or larger than memory allocation is *temporarily* written to the drive.

So ...... you should be able to delete all those old tmp files.

If file allocation data is changing that much, you may want to start a defrag of your drive before leaving for the evening, and/or validate your drive.

All good things for drive performance and health.

http://download.cnet.com/TreeSize-Free/3000-2248_4-81064.html

This is an incredible little program. One of the best I have ever installed, and it's free.

It basically just organizes all of your folders and files in tree fashion with the biggest on top down to the bottom. For instance, I was down to 3GB on a partition, and I was looking all for it.
With this, you suddenly see that Documents and Settings is huge, then drill down, and All Users is huge, then drill down and Application Data is ridiculously big. How in the world did that 65GB backup get in there. It's supposed to be on an external drive. Deleted it and bam. 63Gig. This is a must have program.

@Wayne Are you backing up AC to the same hard drive it is on?

uh. yes burt, but only since Friday. I didn't realize that the new backup utility made a backup where it is AND a second copy where you tell it to. And the .enc file was 13 GB. So that released some. But I still dont know what I deleted and got the other 50 G from.

I deleted a bunch of tmp files on my laptop, and went from 10G free to 13 G free. But I really don't know what is using up so much space. I don't do movies, I dont do pictures (well, not many.). I do some music, but I"m not "buck-wild" with it. Some games -- oh, i deleted Civilization 3 and Birth of the Federation.

Oh, so you were backing up the .enc file somewhere else. I kind of understand Jon's thinking, but it seems if you are smart enough to figure out how to use the Amazing Backup, then you don't need an auto backup in your AC folder. Plus, it can't overwrite.

One place where they may be tons of space taken up is the Recycle Bin.

Oh Bert, I was about to make a nice self-deprecating joke there, but you never know who may read it and it rather personal to them, so I didn't. Since working in this MD office, I've really started cutting back on some of my wise-@$$ humor.

Oh, so can I get it to stop backing up to it's own folder and still back up to the other pc? I probably need to clean the other PC too.

Anyone know the failure rate of these new-fangled ultra-portalbe hard drives? Forget that, I'm going to get some CD-Roms or DVDs and back some stuff up in a non-volatile manner. Then I can just DELETE it.

i cant wait for blue ray burners to get cheap enough to buy, then everything can get backed up in a physical object.
while dvds are great for most things, using eight dvds to back up my pictures is a little out of control.

Bert, I downloaded that program and it is neat but it still did not make my one computer run any faster. Are there built in programs which become activated after a certain date and then cause a computer to slow down so badly it is virtually unusable? I still have a lot of free space on the HD but the programs are so slow to load when the computer is first turned on it drives me absolutely nuts!! I have done all of the system clean up crap, including a purchased Clean PC program without any improvement. I need a live-in guru.

My laptop takes a long time to boot now also. Now, I cruise the internet alot and so i am always cleaning off spyware. Have your anti-spyware and anti virus do complete disk scans. This can sometimes help if there is junk loading when you boot. I'd take mine to a shop and have them look at it if I didnt want a new one so badly. Might do it still.

As far as startup time; run "msconfig" and check on the startup tab - you can get into trouble, but look at what software is running at startup, and see if there are things that you don't need to run as the machine is starting up.

If something isn't running after you turn it off, you can always run "msconfig" and click on the box to automatically start the app again.