Losing Disk Space after aborted defrag

[chanchan05]

Ok, so this is the first time I ever tried defragging my laptop. Now it so happened that I had to abort it for some reasons. I was using the BitDefender 2011 Total Security Defragger, on Vista Ultimate 32bit.

What happened was that I initially had around 20gb free out of 117gb for my C drive. After the aborted defrag, and for the continuing 24hrs later, all that 20gb suddenly got used up by some unknown entities. I checked the user file folders, and they all come out as not having increased in size. There was a point where i had 6gb left, and i tried deleting some unneeded videos, uninstalled some unused (anymore) programs and after the process, I got 4gb left! (WTH? deleting results to decrease in space left?) The worst it got to was at 1.7Gb. After a shutdown and restart, I am now running on 3.9gb free on the C drive, and has decided to restart the defrag and let it finish.

Any ideas on what's happening?

 

[KSoD]

There is no way any of us can possibly know or begin to explain what happened. It could be that the defrag was in the process of moving files when it was aborted and continued to copy them. We dont know. We cant possibly know. Make sure you have Hibernation turned off, shadow copies off and that is about all we can say.

 

[organic]

You can try to track down where all your wasted space is with a program like TreeSize.

https://www.jam-software.de/customers/downloadTrial.php?article_no=80&language=EN&PHPSESSID=d5d6f47de3f9923eb5c1bdc40c10b864

 

[KSoD]

It is the same exact thing as using the Windows Explorer but it shows it as a tree instead of a window with folders. It is the same structure used by Windows in the very early days of its development. If he already checked the folder sizes using Windows UI, then using Tree Size will not net him any different results as it will show him the same information just in a different way.

The space is being eaten up by something that cant be found in any kind of explorer. If it could be found, it would be found just as easily by the Windows UI as it would by a Tree Layout. That tree layout is exactly what was used in Windows 3.11 for Workgroups and evolved from there.

 

[chanchan05]

I think I found what folder iincreased in size. Its the windows folder. I decided to just check wvery folder and I saw that it was suddenly eating up 74gb! The other c folders have also not increased in size as far as I know, and with nothing running in the background aside from tge defrag, I saw the properties window which registered 63gb initially suddenly jumped to 75gb. This jump was also accompanied by a freeing of 2gb of c drive space. Is there any way too see what were the latest files added to the computer?

On further checking, the culprit seems to be the c>windows>temp folder with a huge 55.9gb consumed. Whats this temp folder for? Is it another "temporary" files repository?

 

[KSoD]

The temp folder is exactly what you said. It is a temp storage for files. This is most likely the folder that the defrag was using to move the files around, since you canceled the defrag it probably still had some files it was trying to move so it placed them there.

 

[chanchan05]

Ah, so they'd be safe to delete?or maybe i should move them somewhere first for a few days and see if i get error messages?

 

[KSoD]

If they are in a temp folder they are safe to delete.

 

[chanchan05]

Ok.thanks!