Hi All,
Ok so I understand my title is confusing, not sure what to describe this topic as.
So I had a report that a server was low on available space on a specific drive. I logged on and saw that 58.71GB used has been used (according to the Disk Properties Report), when I go into the drive and select everything it only amounts to 36.8GB. So there is 21.91GB un accounted for. And yes I can view hidden files as well as protected system files.
So I realise there will be things that I cant view as files taking up space, such as shadow copies (which is turned off in my case) or some other tables that are hidden away that I cannot count. I am surprised though, that it is almost double the amount of space to the actual viewable files size. I therefore thought that this was a good topic to chat about.
Unfortunately not really knowing how to describe this issue, made googling it quite challenging. The closest i came was this:
- A file takes up more space on the disk than merely its size. For example, a text file that contains the letters "hello" has a file size of 5 bytes, but it also takes up space in the filesystem's table to store its name and properties. Usually the difference is not greater than a few hundred bytes, but if you have many tiny files, that can add up to quite a bit. You can see the difference by comparing "Size" and "Size on disk" numbers after opening the properties dialog of a file in Windows' file explorer.
- You may be forgetting to check hidden files: make sure you have "show hidden files, folders and drives" enabled in Windows' file explorer options.
- You may be forgetting to check system files: make sure you have "hide protected operating system files" disabled.
- You may be forgetting to count the recycle bin which is a special case of hidden and system files.
- Contents indexing takes up space: if you open the properties dialog for a partition, you can see the option "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties". This takes up space, I'm not quite sure where on the file system.
- Previous versions (or shadow copies or file history) take up space: NTFS has the feature of shadow copies of files, which takes up space not counted in the plain file size.
- You may have enabled compression: this should theoretically cause the used disk space to be smaller than the sum of the file sizes, rather than bigger, but in any case, it's a spanner in the works. You can check by opening the properties dialog of a partition in Windows' file explorer.
http://superuser.com/questions/304474/why-dont-the-sizes-of-my-folders-add-up-to-the-size-of-my-hard-drive-in-windows
As I said before, even with these explanations its very curious how that is so large.
Kind Regards,
Cupis