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I have a 1 TB drive which I split into roughly 5 partitions of 200GB give or take. The windows partition ~200 GB last November was fairly heavily used ~150GB and because I was aware of this I have consciously avoided installing anything on this partition since. The partition however kept filling up, ~190 GB. Recently windows update started freaking out with "I'd like to update but space yo" etc. etc. occasionally this would trigger a crash, especially when I was compiling something.

This weekend I got a gap to fix this, so I whack Visual Studio, ~ 5 GB, run clean disk, ~100 MB, and hit defrag. I also found a button to fix windows update so I was hammering on that guy too. Boom I go from from 15 GB free to 30 GB. Somehow I gained 15GB of free space. I was going to wipe the "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download" folder before I did this and that was ~4GB of data and windows cleared this folder in the process so that explains 4 of the 15GB. Where the heck would I have gained the extra 11GB ?

Carel
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Defrag will give you nothing back. That isn't what it does. It just shuffles around used blocks.

I would guess either junctions referring to the same directory tree or alternate data streams that weren't showing up when looking at a particular set of files.

To really know, you would have needed to take the @Ramhound link to visualize the file system path before you started but even most of those won't work for alternate data streams

Good luck! :)

Señor CMasMas
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