Windows 7 : Disk space : windirstat shows 88 GBs used : Windows shows 143 GBs used

Question

The total disk space shown by the "scanner" program is 232GB and the innermost circle shows used space is 143GB.

When I check with WinDirStat the total files used are 88GB.

Does this mean that the filesystem tree structure is taking the rest of the space ?

That doesn't sound correct. Since it would mean the NTFS data structure is using about 55GBs!

Edit : Just showed SpaceSniffer is showing 53.9 GB as `Unknown (not yet scanned) Space``

Are you taking into account reserved space for the MFT? Also something to consider is the Journal file, which is invisible to many scanning programs.
Not for the Journal file. Something else to consider is space consumed by the System Restore. Of course, to be really sure, you could run a chkdsk /r on your machine.
having the same issue, what was the problem?, running check disk at the moment
Miau : Living with the fact that it indeed uses all that space.

eug · Answer 1 · 2011-06-29 04:21:53Z

Data not found by WinDirStat could be:

Owned by users whose folders WinDirStat doesn't have permission to access. Run WinDirStat as administrator.
Stuff in the Recycle Bins owned by various users? Look at the size of the C:\$Recycline.Bin folder (you may need to disable "hide protected operating system files"
Volume Shadow Copy / System Restore / System Protection. Check out System Properties --> System Protection to configure it.

One additional thing to note is that if you've ever moved your system partition (between drives, or within the drive), System Protection seems to keep the files from the "old" partition and never start protecting the new, unless you manually set it up. I found that System Protection was off for my drive, but it had an old snapshot eating up 10GB until I told it to stop protecting the nonexistent partition.

1 Answer