Now to find (and delete) "invisible" files?

[santamonica813]

Newish desktop PC. Windows 11. First (main) SSD hard drive has 1 TB of space.

Yesterday, I tried to use Lightroom for the first time. Hit "Import" button to make a collection (that might or might not be the correct word) from all my photo files (about 1.5 TB), which are on a different hard drive. Left the computer to do that work overnight.

Woke up today to see a message, "Your hard drive available memory is critically low." And it was. I had thought that a big advantage to Lightroom was that it would leave your files wherever they were, and would instead create a shortcut or sidecar or whatever inside Lightroom, and would therefore take up relatively little memory.

Deleted as much from the Lightroom folders as I could. Completely deleted everything from my OneDrive folder, which cleared up about 230 GB. BUT...that still left this C drive quite filled up. Filled up with????

As I explored the C drive, I found that most of the memory was being held in the Users subdirectory. Inside this folder are only 2 sub-folders: Joshe and Public. Public uses almost no memory. It's the Joshe folder that is the problem.

a. I move the cursor over Joshe and hover. An info screen pops up, which shows 15 GB is being used. Great. That seems about right.

b. Instead of hovering; I right click on Joshe and then click on Properties. Now, it shows that this same folder is using up 624 GB!!!???!!! I don't actually have anything that would use up 600+ GB of memory. (Unless trying to import that mass of photo files is hiding somewhere.)

When I open up Joshe, there are 13 things...several folders, the OneDrive icon, and a few other things. I checked the memory used by each one, of course--by hovering and by right-click + properties. Everything is in allignment with the 15 GB estimate.



So, what do I do now? It's like a thief snuck in during the night and 'stole' more than half my hard drive memory. LOL

(On the last image, I didn't bother to take screenshots of each of the 13 sub-sub-folders, etc. But none of them showed them using that much memory.)

 

[gscotten]

As a start, click on the View menu, then Show. Check the "Hidden Items" box.

I suspect you used the Copy or Move function when you imported your pictures into the Lightroom catalog. If you use "Add" it leaves all your photos where they are and simply creates pointers to them in your catalog. Before doing anything else, check to make sure your images are still on your original drive.

--
George
.
Feel free to retouch any photograph I post in these forums. They probably need it.

 

[Sean Nelson]

Windirstat is a really useful tool for quickly zeroing in on which files and folders are consuming the most space on your drive.

 

[Carey Brown]

It might be that you have your settings such that when you import a file a preview image file is created. These can eat up huge chunks of disk space. I have mine configured to only create them as needed and to delete older ones.

There's a free program called SpaceSniffer that gives you a graphical map of how your disk space is being used. There are similar programs but I happen to like this one.

--
Photos at http://inasphere.com

 

[santamonica813]

It might be that you have your settings such that when you import a file a preview image file is created. These can eat up huge chunks of disk space. I have mine configured to only create them as needed and to delete older ones.

There's a free program called SpaceSniffer that gives you a graphical map of how your disk space is being used. There are similar programs but I happen to like this one.

Much thanks, Carey (and the others who responded). I did download SpaceSniffer and it solved the problem right away. Strangely, under Users>Joshe, SpaceSniffer found a hidden folder called App, and this had lots of video and photo caches, which did total over 600 GB. I just right clicked on Cache, and deleted everything. That did get rid of all of that invisible data, and my C drive is now 80% empty, which is how it should be.

WARNING. For some reason, when I deleted Cache via SpaceSniffer, it also deleted the entire superior folder of Joshe, which had very import information. Fortunately, before doing any of this, I of course did a full backup to my 4TB D drive, and also to an external drive. So, it was very easy to just create a new Joshe folder under Users and then copy back all the information.

Example 3,918 of why it's important to be responsible regarding doing backups. LOL

Thanks again!!!

 

[kelpdiver]

install a different operating system? Few are as bad as Windows with hiding files.

More seriously - the others pointed you to the culprit of the moment. In longer term, however, LR's wish to backup the catalog every week will eventually become a meaningful consumer, esp since it sounds like your catalog is sizeable.

LR default behavior is piggish, to be generous. With a 1TB C: drive, you really shouldn't be having troubles so quickly.

 

[Carey Brown]

It might be that you have your settings such that when you import a file a preview image file is created. These can eat up huge chunks of disk space. I have mine configured to only create them as needed and to delete older ones.

There's a free program called SpaceSniffer that gives you a graphical map of how your disk space is being used. There are similar programs but I happen to like this one.

Much thanks, Carey (and the others who responded). I did download SpaceSniffer and it solved the problem right away. Strangely, under Users>Joshe, SpaceSniffer found a hidden folder called App, and this had lots of video and photo caches, which did total over 600 GB. I just right clicked on Cache, and deleted everything. That did get rid of all of that invisible data, and my C drive is now 80% empty, which is how it should be.

WARNING. For some reason, when I deleted Cache via SpaceSniffer, it also deleted the entire superior folder of Joshe, which had very import information. Fortunately, before doing any of this, I of course did a full backup to my 4TB D drive, and also to an external drive. So, it was very easy to just create a new Joshe folder under Users and then copy back all the information.

Example 3,918 of why it's important to be responsible regarding doing backups. LOL

Thanks again!!!

Glad I could help.

Never tried to manipulate files/directories with SpaceSniffer. Thanks for the heads up.

 

[drj3]

It might be that you have your settings such that when you import a file a preview image file is created. These can eat up huge chunks of disk space. I have mine configured to only create them as needed and to delete older ones.

There's a free program called SpaceSniffer that gives you a graphical map of how your disk space is being used. There are similar programs but I happen to like this one.

Much thanks, Carey (and the others who responded). I did download SpaceSniffer and it solved the problem right away. Strangely, under Users>Joshe, SpaceSniffer found a hidden folder called App, and this had lots of video and photo caches, which did total over 600 GB. I just right clicked on Cache, and deleted everything. That did get rid of all of that invisible data, and my C drive is now 80% empty, which is how it should be.

WARNING. For some reason, when I deleted Cache via SpaceSniffer, it also deleted the entire superior folder of Joshe, which had very import information. Fortunately, before doing any of this, I of course did a full backup to my 4TB D drive, and also to an external drive. So, it was very easy to just create a new Joshe folder under Users and then copy back all the information.

Example 3,918 of why it's important to be responsible regarding doing backups. LOL

Thanks again!!!

You could just check the option of "Hidden Items" on Windows Explorer and you would see all the folders.

 

[santamonica813]

Example 3,918 of why it's important to be responsible regarding doing backups. LOL

Thanks again!!!

You could just check the option of "Hidden Items" on Windows Explorer and you would see all the folders.

Good suggestion. It was, of course, one of the first things I tried. Saw nothing, unfortunately. It was like clicking on the "Hidden" box refused to show the invisible folder(s). LOL

Very very strange experience.