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PROBLEM OF THE FORTNIGHT
Problems Solved
Our experts solve all your tech problems
What’s eating my storage space?
BT Cloud sync enabled (1); select ‘New Simple
Volume’ to allocate drive space (2); in TreeSize
Free, find the files or tools using the most
space (3)Q
My Windows 11 laptop has a
500GB SSD. Recently, I was
surprised to find that I have
only 44GB space left. The Pictures
folder holds 38GB, Documents 24GB
and Videos and Music virtually nil. The
only apps I have installed are BT Cloud,
Skype and three web browsers. Is this
what I should expect, or is something
filling up my hard drive?
John BrownA
Without having our hands on
the machine, it’s hard to say.
However, this concern is aired
by many readers, so we’ll use your
question as an opportunity to explore a
few possibilities – and to explain why
your 500GB drive probably doesn’t
have 500GB of storage.
In fact, we’ll make that aspect our
starting point. As we’ve mentioned
many times over the years, a gigabyte
as calculated by the Windows operating
system is not the same as the ‘gigabytes’
marketed by drive manufacturers.
Without getting bogged down in the
mathematical minutiae, it comes down
to whether the sums are totted up
using decimal or binary. Computers
work in binary, but humans use
decimal.
The trouble is that a binary gigabyte
is bigger than a decimal gigabyte. Why
does that matter? Well, a drive
marketed as 500GB these days tends to
mean 500 decimal gigabytes. But when
Windows gets hold of the drive it
displays the capacity in binary
gigabytes. This is a more ‘honest’
calculation – but 500 decimal gigabytes
is just 465 binary gigabytes. Right away,
that accounts for a ‘missing’ 35GB.
However, clearly that’s not nearly
enough to explain why you have only
44GB left. One suspicion we have is
your mention of having BT Cloud
installed. It’s a common misconception
that cloud services store files only in
‘the cloud’. This is not the case. Manysuch services, BT Cloud included, keep
a local version of every file on your
computer’s drive. The ‘cloud’ aspect
of these systems is for backup or
synchronisation to other devices, or
both (see screenshot^1 ).
So, let’s imagine you’ve thrown 100GB
of stuff into the BT Cloud folder, either for
backup or syncing. That’s 100GB stored
on BT’s servers, but also 100GB lopped off
your own drive’s space.
Another possibility – albeit very
unlikely on a 500GB SSD – is that the
drive has been partitioned, so your
C: drive is using only some of the full
capacity. To check, press Windows key+X
to open the Quick Link menu and then
click Disk Management. This will giveyou a ‘map’ of how your drive’s space
is apportioned. Any space labelled
Unallocated can be brought into use as
a new drive letter: right-click the block
and choose New Simple Volume^2 ,
then follow the instructions.
Finally, for a quick visualisation of
what’s taking up space, and where,
we’d suggest using a tool like TreeSize
Free – a free download from
http://www.snipca.com/41461.
Click the Select Directory button
followed by ‘(C:)’. Then, on the left,
click the right-pointing arrows to drill
down into the folders with the longest
bars to identify the tools or files
responsible^3.27 April – 10 May 2022 • Issue 6301
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