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When I am in the Users directory , alt+dbl click / Property gives me a size of 2GB for the directory Users/myUser/.

When I dive on level into the myUser directory, and if I check the size of all the directories (Download, myPicture, myMusic etc... ), it sums up 820 MB.

In deed I was searching for useless stuffs so as to free some space... And I am really wondering what is this missing 1.2G space that I have no traces of ? ? ?

If I could put the hand on them, I will probably erase this hidden stuff ;-)

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There are some hidden directories under every user directory which store all your program settings, Firefox or Internet Explorer caches and so on.

To see them you need to click "Organize" in the exploer window, then go to "Folder and Search options". Under the View tab there is an option to "Show hidden files". Selecting that and then clicking apply will show you these extra folders.

Whatever you do, do not delete these folders (especially the "Appdata" folder) as they hold data necessary for your programs, hence why they are hidden, you can cause damage to programs that are installed and may require you to reinstall them.

To be completely honest, unless you have a real reason to see the hidden folders or know what you are doing I would leave them as hidden.

If you have to clean up the system to free up some space I would recommend a tool such as CCleaner which can remove or clear out many types of temporary files that you do not need, and will do so much more safely than simply deleting the whole lot.

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Don't woory I wouldnt have deleted AppData :-). Thx for CCleaner, I'm gonna look at it right now. – Stephane Rolland Apr 16 '11 at 13:24
I'm gonna check in AppData (which sizes 1.2GB ;-) ) also which programs consumes the most. Unistall it if ever... else clear the cache maybe... – Stephane Rolland Apr 16 '11 at 13:26
Oooch... Google Chrome is devouring all that space ! – Stephane Rolland Apr 16 '11 at 13:28
Yeah, the caches that IE, Firefox and Chrome store all your stuff in can grow quite large. Each program should have an option to empty it, but CCleaner has an option to empty them out as well, it'd probably be the quickest and easiest way to do them all in one shot. – Mokubai Apr 16 '11 at 13:30

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