HELP: Not sure what's eating all my storage space.

[EBynum]

I have a new Dell Venue 8 Pro. I have about 2 GB of apps installed. I don't have any music, pictures, videos, or documents stored on it. On the desktop, I installed the Amazon MP3 app and the Sonos Controller app. When I check the storage space, the system says my free space is 6.40 GB and my used space is 16.9 GB (total capacity is 23.3 GB). I have no idea what is using up 16.9 GB worth of space. Is there somewhere that shows a list of what's using up all that space? I wasn't able to find it. All I found was the pie chart showing used space and free space. I want to see more details about the used space. It makes no sense to me that I only have 6.40 GB left, considering I don't have a lot of apps and haven't saved any media or documents to it. Anyone else experiencing this?

 

[DBDev]

For the apps you can go to charms bar ? settings ? change computer settings ? search and apps ? appsizes, and for desktop you could try this program: SpaceSniffer, find lost disk space the easy way.

 

[luk3ja]

It might be SkyDrive...it may have downloaded everything that is on your SkyDrive...

 

[vertigoOne]

I've used WinDirStat to find out what is using storage space for years. Great little open source utility.

 

[TrackSmart]

I don't have the tablet yet, but I do have systems with small SSD boot drives, so I watch my space usage. Some ideas:

First, there is a hidden system recovery partition, which can be removed (6-7 GB?) - be sure to make recovery media first (onto a flash drive or spare microUSB card - you will probably need at least 4 GB of space). Second, try running Disk Cleanup (a built in Windows Utility). You can also consider turning off system memory dumps (large memory file dumps after blue screens and crashes). Disk Cleanup can clear them out, but you can also stop Windows from creating them (How To Disable Windows Error Reporting In Windows 7 - TECHRENA). You can turn this feature back on if you have a reason to actually analyze these memory dump files (troubleshooting a specific issue).

I second the use of WinDirStat. Great little program. I use it on all of my machines. It gives you a visual and list-based summary of your disk usage.

Hope that helps.

 

[TrackSmart]

By the way, the Windows Operating System itself is going to use up a large amount of space! I hope you didn't expect to find 32GB of free space when you started it up. This is not Android or iOS, which have small footprints. This is the full version of Windows.

Also, windows reports real gigabytes of data, not what hard disk manufacturers have been calling "gigabytes, so "32GB" really equals 29.8GB as reported by Windows.

Honestly, I was shocked to see them selling 32GB versions of these full Windows tablets. I know they wanted to get that price under $300, but the cost of memory is pretty trivial these days and Windows installations tend to grow over time.

 

[clindhartsen]

I can't speak from owning the device, but looking at some articles about it I imagine that may be a combination of your Windows installation, recovery partition, and maybe any desktop-side apps you've installed.

Two posts above mentioned WinDirStat. That would be a great way to start determining what is using your hard drive. Keep in mind, if you want to get more space, you can get a MicroSD card and, if you format it NTFS, you can apparently move your SkyDrive folder to that card.

 

[bowulf]

You will definitely want to take advantage of the new 8.1 feature of keeping Skydrive storage primarily for "Online-Only." It will only pull the data to the device if you edit the files. You can selectively force the make them offline use ready. 32GB model will give you about 11GB available for use. Running disk cleanup after the first system patches gave me back about 1 GB of space as well from the WinSxS directory.