I work from home using a Win10 PC with a 500GB SSID primary hard drive.
Recently, say within the last month, I noticed the primary HD was getting kind of full- down to 25% capacity. I made a mental note to keep an eye on it, watch the large file downloads, and do some file storage cleanup eventually. The HD seemed to be holding pretty steady at around 25%.
Then late last week I got a “scratch drive full” message. I check, and to my surprise, my HD is full! I start doing some emergency file cleanup, which opens about one eighth capacity and gives me some breathing room, but then I notice my HD is filling back up again, almost as I watch!
So, since I sync to Adobe Creative Cloud for work, I stop the syncing and start closing programs, and I’m about to reboot when I check the HD and it’s back to a quarter capacity! Weird. It seems to be fluctuating up and down a little, for no apparent reason, but it’s holding at around 25%.
This week I’m keeping an eye on the HD storage. It seems to be holding at 25% for the beginning of the week, then today, it’s back down to about an eighth. So I also stop Microsoft OneDrive, which I also sync to a work folder, and I find and delete the formerly synced folder from Adobe CC on my HD, which opens like 70GB. This gives me a comfortable 101GB open capacity on my HD as of 11am today. So I get back to work.
Then I check again a bit over 1/2 hour later, at 11:37am, and it’s down again, to 79.8GB capacity! What is the deal? Do I maybe have some malware that’s secretly using my HD for cloud storage?
Doesn’t always mean you’ve been remiss in your own choices about what to retain on your hard drive.
I had MalwareBytes — of all things! — clutter up my hard drive (Mac) something awful, apparently as failed attempts to update some part of itself. Got oceans and oceans of tiny little 1 MB files in a hidden directory resulting in going from 495 GB free to 15 MB free and error warnings popping up. Found 'em, nuked 'em via Terminal, then a month or so later lather rinse repeat.
So even reputable software can spew junk files and eat your storage space.
I agree with PastTense, a utility that shows how your drive space is being allocated is very useful. On the Mac I use GrandPerspective, for benefit of any Mac users following along at home.
I downloaded Wiztree and found that my temp folder was taking up almost 50GB; and, in addition to my unsynced visible Adobe Creative Cloud folder which I had already deleted, freeing up 70GB, there was also a hidden(?!?) CC folder which was even larger, at a whopping 120+ GB. After deleting my unused temp files and the hidden CC folder my HD is almost 1/2 empty now!
You will want to keep an eye on Creative Cloud. It may well re-create the hidden folder and the visible folder.
You’ll also want to ensure you’ve re-enabled syncing on everything promptly before you forget about this crisis. Two weeks from now is not the time to discover that some stuff you’d assumed was background-synced and preserved has not been because, e.g., OneDrive was inadvertently left suspended / disabled.
Something I do in Windows’ configuration is crank down the allowed size of the system temp folder and also the browser’s cache folder. Because download speeds are as high as they are, keeping every bit of temp or internet detritus from the last 6 months is not nearly as necessary as it was when we were all on dial-up and the default size fractions for those folders was settled.
…I think I’m just going to NOT sync anything anymore; I can always just access whatever docs I need by going directly to the file path online and downloading them. I’m a web dev who consumes creative content to use in web projects, not a creative collaborator who also modifies the creative files, so there’s no need for a 2-way street.
I guess I had thought that ‘file syncing’ meant a virtual copy of the updated file was being kept on my computer with a link to the cloud copy, not actual dupes on my HD. Kind of defeats the purpose of using cloud storage.
Cloud storage can be thought of as continuous backup. If your actual work product is inherently online then yes, local copies aren’t the “master”, they’re just in effect temp files.
As to whether the local files are real or virtual, that depends on your settings. OneDrive supports leaving everything in the cloud until / unless accessed locally. I know zippo about Adobe’s products.
I have a set of coffee cups that proclaim “There is no ‘cloud’ — it’s somebody else’s computer”
I really dislike the obfuscation and mystification that seems to accompany the modern world of remote storage and backup and how it works and where the bloody hell your data actually is.
ETA: I have a non-tech-savvy girlfriend who went frothing-at-mouth berserk when she took her laptop to a location without internet connectivity and all the files she thought were on her Desktop … weren’t. They were on iCloud’s version of the Desktop. Some obscure setting was flipped so local copies were not being synchronized, and she was saving to “the other Desktop”, also called Desktop, which was not on her laptop at all, but displayed as if they were… when she was connected. (ugh!)
Heh, your girlfriend had the opposite problem as me- she thought her files were on her HD but were actually on the cloud, and I thought my ‘cloud-based’ files were actually cloud-based, not duped on my computer. Yeah, I used to consider myself ‘tech-savvy’, and I suppose I still am to a slightly greater degree than the casual computer user, but these days I find it hard to keep up with the latest in cloud computing, software subscription models, collaborative design frameworks like Adobe XD and Figma, et al.
I had a similar problem which turned out to be a Windows update trying and failing to load itself. The program would slow down my web speed for hours downloading the compressed files. Then it would eat up all my ram for a few hours trying to decompress the files. And then it would run out of HD space due to the number of times all of this had occurred.
The solution was to boot from a nearly empty external drive and allow the process to complete. Then i had to manually order it to uninstall the corrupted files several times to get all the instances off of my hard drive.
I’ll mention WinDirStat as a free disk space usage graphical display tool.
Yes, it’s amazing what that finds in terms of temp files, working files, backup copies, lost files. I’ve seen instances where someone accidentally dragged a folder into another one and it was lost in space. Updates can sometimes fail and get “stuck”. Applications keep their own repository of data, update files, backout files, etc.
There’s also shadow copies as a property of your disk to recover pervious versions, if it is enabled. This tends to use X% of free space. Not to mention, emptying the recycle bin.
I agree that hype and fakery is unhelpful to say the least.
But I’d update your coffee cup to say
There is no ‘cloud’ — It’s a massive collection of professionally-maintained professionally-secured redundant large-scale high-reliability computers spread across the planet. Unlike the rickety obsolete non-redundant malware-infested insecure consumer-grade crap sitting on most folks’ desks.
IMO that’s a much more accurate description of reality.
… which is offered to you as a service, perhaps for free or perhaps for a low very reasonable baseline price. Until they discontinue it and give you 10 days to download all your stuff. Or they change their pricing plan and suddenly they’re basically holding your files for ransom.
Or none of the above and they’re providing entirely reliable service and not jacking you around with the price, but then your local network provider goes offline and only then do you realize your files are in places you can’t get to. Because nobody bothered to explain that part, that your files are being stored on the internet and are not on your computer.
100% of my files are on my computer(s). As I use it, the cloud is a sync and backup service only.
Yes, absolutely, corporate America is using the cloud as primary storage. But they were doing that already when Sue in Accounting’s files were on a network share that was really on a computer in the basement.
One of my mottoes is that “you must be smarter than your tools”. Which can be recast as: “Nobody should use a tool they can’t / don’t understand.”
I agree with you completely. Learn how to use your tools. Know your environment.
I’m just saying the industry has moved towards dumbing down what they present to the general computer-using public, specifically with regards to where files are actually located.
Oh and sorry everybody for the hijack. You probably had enough of this tangent.
It’s open source, yeah, but it’s just so much slower that the aforementioned Wiztree, which is still freeware. WDS actually goes through the entire drive looking for files, while Wiztree wisely just looks at your disk’s table of contents (by default).
It’s like 5 seconds for my C: drive using Wiztree vs. 5 minutes using WinDirStat. Heck, even slow spinning disk hard drive takes only a couple seconds more.