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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BEFORE YOU CLICK AWAY!

“Lying.” “Disgusting.” “Scum.” “Slime.” “Corrupt.” “Enemy of the people.” Donald Trump has always made clear what he thinks of journalists. And it’s plain now that his administration intends to do everything it can to stop journalists from reporting things they don’t like—which is most things that are true.

No one gets to tell Mother Jones what to publish or not publish, because no one owns our fiercely independent newsroom. But that also means we need to directly raise the resources it takes to keep our journalism alive. There’s only one way for that to happen, and it’s readers like you stepping up. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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