My PC has suddenly and mysteriously lost a large quantity of disk space since yesterday.

Saturday night, when I went to bed: c.60GB

Shortly after I turned it on today, 8GB, then 5GB, then 1GB.

Clear out my C drive and downloads, and it's up to 167GB...only to go down to 122.

Does anyone else have this problem, and if so, how do I fix it?

Where did you put the data which was previously on your C drive? On an external device?

I got rid of a lot of stuff (downloads, games) that I wasn't using anymore.

Edited December 11, 20169 yr by Drogba11CFC

Aaaaaand it's now gone right down to zero.

sounds like virus ? 

Might be worth trying a disk tidy-up using your anti-virus software. I use Norton and there is an option under performance. There is also a microsoft option which can be accessed via the control panel. 

You might have been hacked, possibly someone has created a partition and dumped a load of stuff on it and hidden it from you.

 

Or it could simply be a programme caching , are you using any video  or image editing software, anything that's resource hungry? 

 

Empty your pre fetch folder, download a cleaner, run defrag, download a hard drive scanner software etc.

Disconnect from the itnernet and run an anti-virus, it's probably something creating millions of files to use up all the space. 

Perhaps run a disk space analyzer to see what's consuming the space, then go from there. Also check your anti virus is up to date.

http://portableapps.com/apps/utilities/windirstat_portable

8 hours ago, Zola said:

sounds like virus ? 

My first thought was an invasion of the disk space snatchers 

Turns out it was an incredibly bloated tempfiles folder.

Could have been a badly written program, which was continually creating temporary files and not cleaning out the old ones. Installed anything recently?