Full hard drive
brucine Posted messages 24411 Registration date Status Membre Last intervention -
Hello,
I acquired a PC with Windows 10 two years ago, featuring a 500 GB SSD for the system and a 1 TB hard drive for data. However, to date, there are only 50 GB free on the SSD that hosts the system. On the other hand, the 1 TB drive is only half full.
Upon checking, the Windows system and programs occupy only 40 GB on the SSD, but in the 'user' directory, the subdirectory 'my documents' is inaccessible (with the message 'access denied') and occupies nearly 328 GB! It is marked by an icon representing a yellow folder with a small arrow. On the D: data drive, the directory titled 'Documents' takes up 514 GB.
Does this mean that part of the documents is mirrored on the system drive?
I admit I do not understand why the 'my documents' directory on the system drive takes up so much space. Is there a way to reduce its size?
Thank you in advance if you can enlighten me.
Best regards
13 réponses
Hello,
All user folders are only accessible by displaying hidden files.
My Documents is a shortcut that corresponds to the Documents folder of each user and is never accessible unlike the latter provided, of course, that you have user rights for this purpose or administrative rights on a third-party user.
In this folder, there is what you have kindly put in, which you can delete or move; in the latter case, due to the little free space, you need to copy in small batches to the other disk before deleting and starting again.
Thank you for the response, but hidden files and directories in the operating system are displaying normally. The issue is that the "My Documents" folder below is not accessible (access denied), so I cannot see what it contains, except that the "Users" folder is 328 GB!
The display eludes me, normally it is of this type where, as I said, we do not have access to the shortcut My Documents but to the Documents folder itself, assuming it is the culprit, it remains likely that hidden and system files are not displayed.
Note also that not at my place, I have censored everything in it that I consider intrusive, but for normal people the Documents folder is directly accessible through quick access.
https://www.commentcamarche.net/informatique/windows/159-personnaliser-l-acces-rapide-de-windows-10/
Thank you for your suggestions, but they do not address my problem: the directory C:\users\serge\my documents seems to be a shortcut according to what you are telling me. However, it is more than 320 GB and therefore takes up almost the entire disk. Moreover, the documents are on drive D:! If it is a shortcut, why does it take up so much space on C:? Is there a mirror copy of the documents on C:? But why would that be?
How can I resolve the issue to free up space on C:?
It's not that it seems, it's a shortcut as evidenced by the arrow, which I repeat cannot be opened.
We should start, as already mentioned, by looking at what the Documents folder actually contains through proper display or quick access, not this shortcut.
"The measuring instrument" may reflect the size of the target Documents folder, the shortcut cannot have anything other than its own few kilobytes.
For the rest, we have no way of knowing; we can name the folder of our choice on a non-system partition Documents, but if it's the system Documents folder, it's because it has been deliberately moved there (never a good idea, always prefer to store data in a non-system folder of your choice), and here too the famous shortcut may indeed reflect the size of the target.
Therefore, we don't know what has been done, but we see no general reason for one to be copied to the other unless it's the result of a synchronization or programmed backup, which should then also not be ignored.
A simple DOS command at the command prompt will tell me what the Documents folder actually contains, organized by subfolder and with size (in bytes).
DIR C:\Users\brucine\Documents /S
Hello,
What is obvious from your screenshot is that the My Documents (or Documents) folder is missing. It should be in the Users\Serge folder. It's an easily recognizable folder since it has a specific icon, different from the regular yellow folder icons.
Even if at some point you moved this folder to D, the original folder should still be present and empty.
However, this folder has disappeared.
The first question I have is where a file (for example, .doc or .pdf) goes when you send it to Documents. Does it go to D?
Then I would proceed as follows:
1) The first thing to do is to restore a correct My Documents folder.
See Part 2 in this tutorial: https://www.ubackup.com/fr/data-recovery-disk/dossier-documents-supprime-par-erreur.html
After that, you need to make sure that the current Documents folder on D is indeed the one that contains your documents (the first question I have)
2) I would delete the Documents shortcut that is in your user folder (the huge one that weighs 328 GB)
3) I would rename the Documents folder on D to whatever you want and transfer some of its contents to the My Documents folder you created in the user folder.
4) After verifying that the new My Documents folder you created works normally, I would transfer it to D.
There are plenty of tutorials; for example: https://www.chantal11.com/2009/05/deplacer-mes-documents-ou-tout-dossier-personnel-sur-autre-partition-windows-7-8-10/
Then you will finish transferring all your documents to the folder you just created on D.
What is well conceived is clearly expressed,
And the words to say it come easily.
(Boileau)
Thank you for your very detailed response, but before I dive into the manipulations you indicated, here are a few clarifications:
- I do have a "my documents" folder on the D: data drive with a value of 515 GB to date, no difficulty there since the drive contains 1 TB.
- On the other hand, the C: system drive of 500 GB is 90% full, mainly due to the folder C:\users\serge, which has a "my documents" shortcut taking up 328 GB. This is exactly what I don't understand: if it's just a shortcut, it shouldn't take up that much space on the drive (see the picture of the directory structure above)...
In this case, how can I reduce it?
Hello,
Execute this command in your CMD, command prompt exactly, as Brucine recommends. In administrator mode, right-click... So copy:
DIR C:\Users\brucine\Documents /S
Replace brucine with serge of course.
Look at the result, if there are indeed 320 GB of documents, if you have the equivalent on drive D, you can delete it!
You are missing this folder (with its characteristic system folder icon):
I don't know why there is a shortcut in its place with this unbelievable size.
If you find your recent documents in the Documents folder on drive D, I think you can delete this cumbersome shortcut. (At a minimum, rename it to anything to avoid a permanent action).
Then, as I indicated, go through the registry to recreate the system folder.
I'm sorry but I don't have access to a DOS command type from Windows 10 (that wasn't the case with the previous W7...).
I can't delete or rename the shortcut c:\users\serge\my documents. See here the screenshot with the message received:
Is there no solution?
I'm sorry, but I don't have access to a DOS command prompt from Windows 10 (that wasn't the case with the previous W7...). That's absolutely impossible, cmd.exe exists in Windows 10 and 11, some commands need to be executed as an administrator, and if you don't allow it, security software may censor scripts or local security policies set by the administrator if you are just a user, but that's another question.
Hello
Of course you can do it if you want.
Have you determined all the files on C: and their sizes as advised several times? You have the software Windirstat that would give you many precise answers.
Here’s another small one with fewer functions:
https://www.spawnrider.net/2014/10/10/scanner-permet-de-visualiser-loccupation-de-vos-disques-sous-windows/
From a distance, with the information provided, there are too many possible causes to give a direct reason for this behavior; you have too much freedom to do everything and its opposite on your PC.
The names of directories and their locations with Windows are too random on an unknown PC.
We could very easily help you find a standard PC with a lot of free space, but we never allow someone to do it on the forum.
On the other hand, the famous system shortcuts for user folders are symbolic links that lead to the parent directory like simple shortcuts.
If, due to some unwanted tinkering, they had become junctions, there would then be duplication of content in both targets, which could explain why your daughter is silent.
Rather than trying to figure out the issue, in such conditions a repair or reinstallation of Windows will likely restore the correct paths.
Thank you for your response, I followed the recommended steps (see the screenshots) with windirstat and CMD. I'm at this point, it would probably be better to reinstall Windows but I am too inexperienced to take that risk. Thank you anyway for trying to help me.
The second copy is likely to yield erratic results because any path with a special character (space) must be enclosed in quotes, and in any case, this is not a folder but a shortcut that contains nothing.
If they are not, the folder contains only empty subfolders.
dir "C:\users\brucine\my documents" /s
would be more orthodox.
What interests us in the first capture is not the entirety but the detail of the serge folder expanded by + to see which folder contains what.
OK, windirstat is really effective (thanks for recommending it), in fact, it's the appdata directory that is responsible as seen in the following capture. Is it possible to clean this directory without risking the system's functioning?
of the system?
I’m starting to understand: it’s visible in the attached screenshot. I regularly use Cobian Backup to make weekly backups. I’ve configured the mirror backup so that files deleted from my hard drive are also deleted from the backup drive afterwards. Do I need to remove this option?
So it's not the shortcut to my documents or the documents folder that is responsible.
A backup must indeed be incremental; it removes from the destination what no longer exists in the source.
You seem to be doing this backup in your user folder, including what is already there (Documents, Images), and that doesn't make sense.
If the data is on the C: drive, it should be backed up to the D: drive and then to any external storage, but if we want an efficient system, we should not store this data if it takes up a lot of space on C: but directly on D:
It seems that, I make my backups with something else, the Safe Mirror option in Cobian Backup stores in the folder of the same name what is deleted from the destination, which makes no sense and is unrelated to what we generally want, an incremental backup; this option should be disabled.
https://www.astucesinternet.com/logiciels/cobian-backup-11/cobian-backup-11-options-sauvegardes/
Simpler incremental solutions like SyncBack Free or Robocopy via the command line without any software seem easier to implement.
Indeed, there was an anomaly due to an option in Cobian Backup that had escaped my notice until now, which was copying deleted files in documents (as part of a mirror incremental backup) into a directory titled "safe mirror" on C:! I should note that my backups are made on external drives...
I deleted this option and the "safe mirror" directory on C:
As a result, I now have 376 GB free on the system disk! Phew!
In any case, thank you all for your help as it allowed me to gain clarity and finally solve this issue that had been worrying me.
Best regards
Perfect.
That said, this Safe Mirror is not a good way to do backups, but one can conceive that there is one.
Historically in the professional environment, backups were made on two sets of cartridges, on even days and odd days; of course, only one cartridge could be used at a time, but the idea was to protect against the failure of one of the two media and to make a compromise: one could recover from a crash within a maximum of 48 hours, but also from anything that might have been inadvertently deleted if one doesn't realize it immediately, something that simultaneous backups on two media do not allow.
A weekly frequency seems low to me in both scenarios; the idea of reproducing this pattern by backing up one day on one medium and the other on the other seems better to me.