August 19, 2012

Why Do I Have 80 GB of Mysterious Crap on My Computer?

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A little while back I noticed that I had run out of room on my backup drive. That seemed kind of weird, since I don’t have a huge amount of stuff on my primary (Windows 7) drive. So I looked around to see what was up.

Long story short, I have about 150 GB of stuff on my primary drive. Several different methods confirm this. However, it turns out there’s another 80 GB of mysterious dark matter there, which (apparently) gets compressed into 75 GB of backup dark matter on my backup drive. I’m flummoxed. What is this stuff? As near as I can tell, I’ve accounted for everything: hidden files, system files, swap files, hibernation files, etc. etc. But there’s still 80 GB more. What can it possibly be?

UPDATE: Mystery solved! It was 80 GB of restore points accumulated since the day I bought the PC, because that was the default setting my machine came with. I cut the maximum down to 15 GB and that restored 65 GB of free space. Thanks, everyone!

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In "It's Not a Crisis. This Is the New Normal," we explain, as matter-of-factly as we can, what exactly our finances look like, how brutal it is to sustain quality journalism right now, what makes Mother Jones different than most of the news out there, and why support from readers is the only thing that keeps us going. Despite the challenges, we're optimistic we can increase the share of online readers who decide to donate—starting with hitting an ambitious $300,000 goal in just three weeks to make sure we can finish our fiscal year break-even in the coming months.

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