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Question

Low disk space problem help

Aug 17, 2014 6:21PM PDT

I need your help to fix the low disk space problem of my C partition. Honestly, like others, my computer drive is also divided into four partitions and store different computer information separately. However, yesterday, a low disk space notice stopped me installing a new video editing program on my computer. There was about 2% of free space left. So, do you know how to cope with this low disk space problem? Do I have to buy a larger drive to instead of the original one? Thank you for any suggestion!

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: low disk space
Aug 17, 2014 6:36PM PDT
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Answer
If it were me
Aug 17, 2014 11:39PM PDT

If it were me, I'd just probably reinstall the OS after merging all the partitions into one. There's really no benefit at all to having your data spread out like that across different partitions, a HDD failure will take down all the partitions at the same time, so you still need a backup and if you reinstall the OS, you still need to reinstall virtually all programs, even if they were installed on a different partition. There are very few benefits and plenty of problems with the setup you describe.

A couple things to keep in mind are that you don't want to touch any recovery partitions that may be on your system unless you have a backup and even then you may want to think otherwise. There are also a couple of small partitions created automatically for GPT systems that you're not going to get rid of, period.

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Fe: different partitions
Aug 18, 2014 5:27AM PDT

Depending of the amount of data and how variable it is, it can make sense to have an OS-partition for your OS and programs, and a data partition for your data.

For the OS-partition you make an image backup (say 50-70 GB). For the data partition you make a file backup of only changed files (can be 1 TB or more, depending on your data). Add a few selected files from the OS-disk to that file backup (like favorites/bookmarks, .dot files with macro's and such) and you have the best of both worlds, because both backups are relatively fast, and you can restore the OS-image while keeping all your data, and you can restore any data file by file.

Kees

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But any decent backup program
Aug 18, 2014 9:39AM PDT

But any decent backup program, that you pay for anyway, should allow you to do selective backups of only specific directories within a drive. Then again, probably 99.8% of the time you run into this scenario it's someone thinking that somehow splitting the drive into partitions will absolve them of the responsibility of making regular backups. Probably 99% of the remaining 0.2% think that it will somehow improve performance of the system to have it set up like that.

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Answer
It depends on your conditions
Aug 18, 2014 11:49AM PDT

Hey, Karentid! It depends.
1). If there is enough free space left on the same physical drive with this C partition, you can directly try to extend this C partition space with Disk Management tools. Open Disk Management, shrink or delete one partition with free space, right click your C partition and select Extend Volume to add the free space to this partition.
This way often works when the free space is behind this C partition.
2). But, if the free space is not continuous to this partition, some partition resizing software, like GParted, IM-Magic Partition Resizer Free, Active Master Partition and more online, could be your choice to help you out.
3). But, if there is no any free space left, just buy a larger drive to instead the original one.
In case of data loss, also back up all partition data in advance.

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Answer
you can also try this
Jan 13, 2015 8:34PM PST

This issue may be caused by the allocated windows update files ,scheduled backup or system restore backup or scheduled tasks to write to the drive .We can not rule out the possibility that it is caused by the malicious program .

Please take the following steps to have a troubleshoot :
1.Run the antivirus software to perform scan of the whole system .

2. Clean up the disk with built-in tool .
To clear the disk ,right click the disk and choose "Disk Cleanup" to clean up the disk.

3.If there is a file keeping growing ,we can use resource monitor to monitor. To open the resource monitor ,open the task manager and choose performance ,open resource monitor. You may need to manually check the path to look for the specific big file .