Windows 10 drive C is filling up Until programs starts crashing

Question

I am currently having a delima where my system drive is filling up until 0 bytes left, this causes programs to start crashing.

Restarting the computer returns my 7GB (I know its not much left anyway :D) of free space back. It is getting annoying so i want to find the culprit. I ran WinDirStat after a restart and when the memory is full and took a screenshot comparison. I could not find all 7GB. The only difference is "System File" is bigger by 3.3GB.

Any ideas? Currently my hard drive is at 0 bytes so if you have any suggestions for me to try. Oh! no installing of new programs because i cant download anymore even to another drive since my browser is installed on C and it needs to cache the download. and also most programs to install needs a restart which makes it difficult to find.

I thought maybe it was a windows update but i have deffered my updates to a later date (because i am currently have a metered connection) and there is no anomaly in my data consumption where i was deducted 7GB

Answer 1

Some program is eating up your disk space by writing continuously to a file(s). Since rebooting returns this space, it's clear that the program never commits the file by flushing it or closing, so the file is certainly some temporary file.

You may check in the temporary file folders in Windows, typically found in two locations:

• %systemdrive%\Windows\Temp
• %userprofile%\AppData\Local\Temp

As these files are never closed, you might find several of them in one of these locations, but they will most likely be of zero size. Their names might contain some hint of the process/product that created them.

You may also check in the Resource Monitor, Disk section, which processes are writing continuously to the disk. This which might locate the malfunctioning product.

If this is not enough, you could try using the free Autoruns for Windows to selectively disable startup processes. See this answer for more information.