missing harddrive space win7 prof

[killernerd]

It's been bugging me for a while now, my main C drive is a small 128GB SSD (111 of which are usable).
Lately I've had the impression that that drive has been slowly filling up with data while I haven't installed a thing on it for months.

Now I understand that certain caches and internet files do take up space and that those might increase over time but not to this extend.
So I've started digging a bit, seeing where I might be able to free up space and, more importantly, where all my drive space has gone off to.

So far this is what I've been able to find:
Total drive space: 111 GB
total in use: 109 GB
free: 1.89 GB

C:\ usage: 72.3 GB (selecting everything under C:\, right click => properties)
system protection: 10.84 GB (not sure if that's already included in the above result though)

so that's at most 83 GB of disk space, where's the other 30?

recycle bin is empty
disk cleanup reports no more than 400 meg of data can be freed

So where did all that damned storage go to?

edit: ran a little program called WinDirStat and it reports that about 30 gigs (28 to be exact) are being used by the pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys files.
This strikes me as odd because I thought the pagefile was used to swap out RAM and is only really used when your system is low on RAM. Seeing that my system has 16 gigs of ram and that I've never even come close to using it all I wouldn't expect to find a pagefile of that size in my system.
And I'm not even sure what the hiberfil file is or does... More googling is required.

 

[killernerd]

Alright, I've done some minor tweaks and all seems to be well now.

I've set the pagefile to a max of 1024 MB and simply disabled hibernate. So far I haven't even used hibernate on this machine so I have no clue how that file got to be that big...
And with 16gigs of ram I don't think I need a pagefile of 16 gigs.

In any case, should I ever run into trouble I'll simply set the pagefile back to system managed.

 

[kumquat]

Shadow Copies could be part of it too.

 

[mnewxcv]

The hibernate file does not build up. It is a reserved area of your disk the size of your memory so it can dump all the info from your memory to the disk to save the current state. Definitely worth disabling if you do not use the feature.