There is a lot here, Check the bottom for TL;DR
Hi all,
I have recently had an issue with my computer and I was hoping that someone could:
- Help me fix it
- Try and explain what went wrong
Now, the problem: In the last couple of days I have been watching a lot of movies, I seriously mean like so many that I've need to watch them at 1.5x speed just to get through them all, but this has led me to something of a problem.
As I was watching these movies I noticed that my hard disk has slowly been filling up, I thought to my self that it was probably something to do with me using that HDD to backup windows, however it isn't. I can still see the windows backup file and it is still the same size as it was a week ago, the last time I backed up.
So I set out to discover what it was that was using this space, I went through all the folders on the drive to discover what was happening, luckily this is simply my drive for movies and movies, so there aren't that many files. However the problem is that when I check the properties of the drive it says:
Used Space 1.72 TB
Free Space 98.7 GB
But when I check the properties of the files within the drive (i.e Highlight them all and click properties) it says the size is 1.50 TB, Size on disk also being 1.50 TB, and yes I am also highlighting hidden files...
After doing this I was thoroughly confused and went to watch another movie, but I Finished the movie the Free space dropped by about 1.5 GB, the exact same size as the movie I had watched. So I opened up a couple of other movies and as I watched them the free space slowly decreased, when I was not watching a movie the free space stayed the same, which has lead me to believe that it is VLC that is creating some sort of file or writing something to the disk which is not being deleted and which I cannot see.
I Figured it might be something to do with the fact that I hadn't restarted VLC for about a week so I restarted my computer entirely and now the problem is gone, however I would quite like to get my disk space back!
More info:
- I Asked a friend about this and he thought it might have something to do with windows creating a file because I didn't have enough memory, so it might create virtual memory, however this is unlikely as I have 12 gigs of ram and only about 3 gb was being used, not only that but normally this file would be created in my system drive, not just my media drive, and It wouldn't be 200GB
- I am running Windows 7 64x
- The HDD in question is set up with just random files, mostly music and movies, I am using another disk for my actual windows files. I actually mean another disk, not just another partition.
- I Am using VLC media player 1.1.4, which I believe is the most recent
TL;DR
Every time I used VLC media player for a while it used up some space on my hard disk which I cannot get back. When I restarted my computer the problem went away but I still am missing about 200gb of disk space.
I would like to know how to get that disk space back without copying everything off the disk then formatting it.
Thanks For any responses.
