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I have a 1-TB HDD and I decided to delete all the junk files after realizing there were only a couple of GBs of space left:

only a couple of GBs of space left

I used WinDirStat, to list all the folders and files in the directory and their size, but it marked they were only occupying around 300 GB] (289 GB, to be precise):

enter image description here

At first I thought it was a software bug and ran it again, but it kept showing the same total size. I tried to select all files and see their properties, in order to get the overall size. However, the shown size is still 289 GB:

enter image description here

Apart from that, there are no hidden files in the explorer (despite the program showing two folders -those with the HS attributes- and having the "Show hidden files" option marked) nor partitions in the disk. It's really strange that it shows 600 GB less of capacity than its actual value and I can't get my head around it.

Disk Management:

enter image description here

DavidPostill
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Héctor Iglesias
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1 Answers1

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There are two possible explanations that can verify.

Broken NTFS file system

You might have an enormous amount of clusters being set to "in use" according to your cluster bitmap in your NTFS file system of your volume labeled E:. Running chkdsk would release those clusters that might be set to "in use" but do not belong to any file.

alternate data streams

It is possible to assign additional space to files residing on a NTFS volume, so-called "alternate data streams". That space does not appear in Windows explorer. Such space diminishes the number of free clusters. Your very first picture showing you free space is most probably based on a free cluster calculation whereas the windirstat output is based on file length information which does not take into account alternate data streams.

There is a competitor called Treesize that show ADS use:

https://www.jam-software.de/treesize_free/windirstat_alternative.shtml

There are free tools around to find ADS streams:

https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/alternate_data_streams.html

r2d3
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