How To Free Space On Windows C Drive

[Ronna Bordelon]

Ihave an 8Tb drive where I store my dropbox files on my Windows computer and despite setting all files to be 'online only' as well as going to Dropbox preferences and setting select sync to not sync any folders I am still getting the message "Can't sync not enough free space". In my system settings it appears the files are still taking up space on my "Apple" drive where I have drobox downloaded and have set it to sync to (I have less than 200GB of non-dropbox data on that Apple drive).

I had this problem on my Mac a year ago and solved it by checking the box on the website to not have online files take up hard drive space. I've done the same for my PC. I have unlimited space on my dropbox account. I have updated Dropbox to the latest version (released December 21st 2021). I have read through every relevant online article and forum I could find. So now I am here.

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I believe I have been using Smart Sync (where I would select which folders were local or online only). I selected all of the folders and set them to online only. Then after that wasn't clearing up space, I went to Selective Sync in my settings and unchecked all the folders there.

Sorry for the delayed response. Last week I tried deleting a bunch of files on the internal drive however Dropbox still gave me the error (however I'm not sure if I completely quit and restarted Dropbox then).

Since then I uninstalled dropbox completely, and the second I did that a bunch of 'ghost' dropbox files appeared (I'm using 'ghost' cause I don't know what else to call them, my computer thinks they're taking up space even though I can't open them and they are unreadable). My computer thought these dropbox files were taking up >100Tb of space (see attached picture) which is impossible on my 8Tb drive. The size of 110Tb does make sense given it's from my business partner's shared folder and we have a lot of data on there, however to my knowledge none of those shared folders were ever downloaded or selected to be synced on this drive.

I believe these ghost files (which had never showed up on my computer before) were the primary reason for my computer/dropbox to think there was space being taken up. I know this was a problem on Mac (in terms of offline files appearing to take up space), is there a way to fix this on Windows? I would love to reinstall dropbox but worry that it will take over my computer again.

My E drive is internal. When I tried reinstalling dropbox and having the folders online (after a couple days of waiting for Dropbox to sync) I ran into the same error "cannot sync not enough disk space", however there's still several terrabytes of free space on the disk.

I thought for a second it might be because the disk is damaged, however when I ran some repair software it said it wasn't. I'll look more into this (maybe uninstall Dropbox and reinstall it on a different disk).

Just thought I'd jump in here to say that I use Smart Sync on at least two thirds of the stuff I have in Dropbox, and it still says my hard drive is 90% full, and Online Only files that cannot be opened when Dropbox is off show up as the biggest files in WinDirStat.

The following image shows the Disk Management overview for several drives. Disk 0 has three partitions, and Disk 1 has two partitions. On Disk 0, the C: drive for Windows uses the most disk space. Two other partitions for system operations and recovery use a smaller amount of disk space.

Disk Management might show the EFI System Partition and Recovery Partition as 100 percent free. However, these partitions store critical files that your PC needs to operate properly, and the partitions are generally nearly full. It's recommended to not modify these partitions in any way.

Disk Management supports a wide range of drive tasks, but some tasks need to be completed by using a different tool. Here are some common disk management tasks to complete with other tools in Windows:

I'm having to look after a W2008 server which has a C drive configured to be 20Gb and which is down to 1.5Gb free. On current trends it will run out of space altogether in the future. The growth in space used is largely attributable to system updates and so somewhat out of my control

The C drive is on Volume 0 which contains some other disks (see details below). Is it possible to reduce the space allocated to the other disks (E, F, J) and then make the C drive bigger using the space freed up by the shrinking ?

There are two ways to do this. One is like Knox suggested; using a third party disk partitioning product. The other is to move the data on the E, F and J partitions to another logical disk (another raid array or maybe a temporary external device) if you have one. After moving the data, delete partitions for drives E,F and J then extend the C drive (I suggest 80GB) and if you need to, set things back to the way you want them to be.

Other people will suggest resizing partition software, which you may find useful. I don't have the details. However, a quick fix is to move your swap file (paging file) from the default C drive to one of your other volumes on the same disk. Right mouse click on My Computer, and pick properites. Then Advanced System Settings, and then select Performance Settings. Then on the advanced tab, you should see already checked by default "Automatically manage..." Set the C drive to No paging File and then set one of the other drive letters to System Managed. Well, one of the other drives that has plenty of room.

You can try some partitioning software like Knox suggested. Another option for you would be to pickup an inexpensive drive(s), it looks like you're currently running on a 250gb drive/mirror now, and just image your entire array over to the new drive/drives after you've setup the partitions the way you want them.

If I was in your shoes, I would add a new RAID1 array with 1 or 1.5TB disks and copy & expand the volumes with a 3rd party partition tool that understands Microsoft volumes. Then keep the old set of hard disks as snapshot or archive. Don't worry if Windows activation kicks up (it shouldn't, but it might), just give them a call as instructed on the screen and you should be good to go.

Aside from purchasing additional drives I would focus on moving data storage from the C: to one of the other drives. Move user profiles to those drives and reinstall programs to those drives. Make sure log files get stored on those drives too. It's good to have C: be the system partition and to keep data on another. 20G is tight but doable.

I have been using the Windows 8 Developer Preview for about 5 months or so and in order to install it on my PC, I had to create a rather small partition on my primary hard drive consisting of only about 16GB. Thankfully, a clean install of Windows 8 will fit comfortably within that space and still provide enough room for some basic utilities and drivers (of course, I do have other secondary partitions that I use for installing applications).

After I was satisfied that my experiment was finished, I deleted all of the files I had used to fill the drive and I am sure I heard the PC breathe a sigh of relief as free disk space shot up to a more reasonable number.

The primary symptom (at least in XP) is that the user profile cannot be loaded and a new, temporary, blank one is created. This is extremely frustrating because it requires messing with the registry to reset the paths to point to the original/old user profile.

I am constantly getting those messages after I salvaged data from a broken (usb plug kept coming out) wd passport. Curse you, WDC for not making the enclosure removable. I need to buy a new external drive.

In the location Windows is stored on the disk, there are all kinds of cached files from installed applications. I think this includes installers from Windows Update, .NET Framework, and other sources.

When your hard drive starts to fill up, you don't have to dig through File Explorer to see what's using space. You can use a disk space analyzer to scan your drive (or just a single folder) and see exactly which folders and files are using space. You can then make an informed decision about what to remove and quickly free up space.

These tools are different from disk cleaning applications, which automatically remove temporary and cache files. An analyzer will just scan your drive and give you a better view of what's using space, so you can clear up disk space.

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