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Strange! I have bo issue accessing that folder. 
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Cp-Coder wrote: I have noticed before that disk space is slowly eroded over time for no apparent reason. What is eating the free disk space?
Some programs insist on cluttering your C with temp downloads and log files; search the "ProgramData" folder in the root - my WinPC is 3 months now, and already it has 5Gb there. One of the offending ProgramData subfolders is "PackageCache" (1.7 Gb) and there's NVIDIA taking 1.87Gb in their private "downloader" folder there.
There's another downloadfolder on "C:\Windows\SoftwareDistribution\Download" which has a few MB in it. If your machine was older, there's some minidumps you might want to get rid of, but I don't think there's a lot of them on a fresh machine.
Makes me wonder though how much download-folders are present on the drive 
Bastard Programmer from Hell 
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Thanks! 
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You're welcome
Bastard Programmer from Hell
If you can't read my code, try converting it here[^]
"If you just follow the bacon Eddy, wherever it leads you, then you won't have to think about politics." -- Some Bell.
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Eddy Vluggen wrote: Makes me wonder though how much download-folders are present on the drive
At least one for every self-updating program you have installed. 
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It is coming from the uninstall files of the windows updates. Every time a patch is installed by windows update, uninstall files are kept in the windows directory - that's how the patch can be removed if via the windows update menu. With a clean windows install, these are gone, since all the patches are integrated into that newer version of windows directly.
My former PC was old enough to contain several major updates of win7. After cleaning the windows directory containing these uninstall, I could free about 200Gb, which was almost 50% of my disk space. With the drawback of not being able to uninstall old windows update kbs anymore, but who needs that ?
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If you look at the properties of your system drive and select Disk Cleanup / Clean up system files, you get the option to remove the old files left over by the updates. I do this after every major update.
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Why don'T you just take an image of the clean full installed system once done?
AOMEI or Macrium would do the job.
OriginalGriff likes AOMEI, I personally like the Macrium CD more.
I know Hirens is back for Win 10 in a DVD, didn't chekc it yet though.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Macrium is my flavor of choice too. The image is already done!
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We used to do that at work, frequently restoring a clean machine. This was essentially for the software test setups: We wanted tests to be run in a controlled environment.
It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all. If you install a six month old image, you have to rerun all the same updates as you did when installing the image the week before, and two weeks before, collected over the six months, plus those of last week. It might take an hour or two running the updates.
I think this must have bothered a lot of users. MS did tune up its update procedures to speed up things. This was a few years ago.
We couldn't wait for the update processing (maybe several times a week). So we made an cleanup script to do all the things mentioned here: Clean up all temp directories (including personal ones in \users\<username>\AppData\Local for all users), the \users\<username>\AppData\pip directory (if you are using Python software), any .log, .temp or .tmp file, uninstall files, browser caches, and a number of locations particular to the tools we are using. Nowadays we are introducing Docker, and if your users are not well behaved and forget to include the -rm option when they run a container, you'll soon have a big pile of stale containers that must be cleaned out by a 'docker system prune'.
To catch the big disk space thiefs, I would recommend TreeSize Free[^] (there is a fancy 'pro' pay version as well, but the free version will do the job). It may run as Administrator, to map space usage in directories you cannot access as a non-prileged user. It certianly is not without flaws, but is is fast, catches the most obvious space hogs, and it is free.
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Member 7989122 wrote: It worked OK for the first few weeks, maybe a month or two. But then the Windows Updates started piling up (the security guys in the IT group demanded that we install them all.
That's why I do a restore, update new image in the "ready to go" version. Keeping a copy of each second updated vm
Yes... I have 8 or 9 copies of Win7 in different states
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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That is what I do at my home computer, where I can discard the old image with no worries.
At work, there is a requirement that we - for years into the future - must be able to reconstruct the exact same development environment as was built to generate a given release, capable of building a bit identical copy of the released software. One consequence of that was that we would have to archive every single complete disk image. In principle, we could discard those that was never used for any release, but with many projects and many releases, the management problem would be large and the risk of missing info about a release (and deleting the image used to build it) was large. So we rejected that option.
I am far from being a great lover of Docker (especially on Windows, but even the Linux variant is ... well...), but it does solve a number of such problems. Once you have generated a Docker image, it is not affected by any environment changes (unless, of course, the build script fetches stuff from outside through the network interface). The way we have organized our images, in a multi-layered structure, it is very space efficient as well: If, say, one project requires a couple new/updated Python packages, we make a new image with the old one as base, and run a couple "pip install" to create a "varnish layer" that requires space measured in kilobytes. All the unchanged elements are physically shared with the old image (even at runtime).
So we have few if any disk space issues. Still we have issues: Some developers insist on using the latest and greatest version at any time (this goes particularly for Python packages). We could end up with thousands of Docker images, which would cause a significant management problem. So we let the developers use a "development" Python Docker image in the development phase, allowing downloading of any new version. In the relase phase, they are required to switch to a stable Python image that has disabled any network download: The project presents a list of packet versions they "need", we make a new varnish layer with these packets, and that is what is used for the relase build. This seems to be working fine - at least for now
(But that is for the Linux projects. Windows and Docker... arrrgh. We have given up for now. Maybe it will come later.)
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I just want Microsoft to make cleaning the ProgramData folder a none issue.
Each windows update is kept.
Crash reports are practically silent to normal users, and can eat GB of dump logs.
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Just today, I was inspecting a Windows desktop PC that came back from a test setup at our manufacturing partner. It had a 1GB hard drive, with less than 1MB space available.
I looked at %TEMP%, \Windows\SoftwareDistribution, \Windows\Prefetch, \Windows\winSXS, \ProgramData ... no luck.
Then I found 850GB in \Windows\Temp
Apparently, "Disk Cleanup" does not clean up \Windows\Temp
The mind boggles ....
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I assume you mean a 1TB HDD. If not, your disk compression software is seriously amazing! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I know OG knows this but he probably wont post as he's done one this week - but I love this one
A Scottish prick in a fast car (3)
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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BMW
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Yay !!! NO
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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"What's the difference between a hedgehog and a BMW convertible?" 
The old ones are the best!
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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I do - I'm letting the others have a go.
If it isn't solved in time, I'll post it.
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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Nice one!
"It is easy to decipher extraterrestrial signals after deciphering Javascript and VB6 themselves.", ISanti[ ^]
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JAG
In Word you can only store 2 bytes. That is why I use Writer.
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Yay well done
"We can't stop here - this is bat country" - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Thanks to The Onion, one can stay ahead of the pack!
modified 20-Nov-19 5:54am.
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