Tips on How to Free Disk Space on Your PC or Server

I have noticed a lot of people on the internet having issues with their hard drives filling up "mysteriously" and they are not sure what to do to reclaim some of that disk space. I've already written a handful of articles that touch on various consumers of disk space, so I am going to bring all of them together in one place for your convenience. I will keep adding to this page as I write more articles that are along these same lines.

Phantom space used in Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Vista

A common issue that has baffled a lot of administrators is where a large amount of disk space is showed as in use, but they can’t find the files that are using it. For example, ff you go to the root of the C: drive, select all of the files, right-click, and click properties. The amount of space shown as used on that properties window isn’t nearly what it should be if you deduct it from the size of the drive and compare your results to the free space that Windows explorer, or my computer shows.

There are a couple things that most often contribute to this. The first is a bloated, oversized $TOPS file. You can set your system to specify that the Transaction Resource Manager will clean the transactional metadata on the next mount, or reboot.