Lost 100+ GB on ssd. How to understand where, and what to do with it?

Question

Windows

Good afternoon. A couple of days ago, the disk was filled with 76-78 GB. Today a warning popped up that there was no room.
It became interesting where it had gone, if before that for two years everything was in order.


Checked with WinDirStat. When you open the program, it shows that drive C is 85% full.


After the end of the analysis, it gives out information that 77GB is occupied, conditionally, what happened a couple of days ago.


What could be the reason for this problem and how to return gigabytes?

Answer 1

Try running the program as administrator (hold shift, run as administrator), UAC may not give you full access to files.

Answer 2

with firefox

Answer 3

Most likely shadow copies.
See how much space they take up and delete the ones you don't need.

Answer 4

Run disk cleanup in its properties

Answer 5

Judging by the screen above, your system is full of logs from some recovery / installation process.
Go through the system, pathcleaner'om . It will clean out the winsxs and installer folders from temporary \ unnecessary shit.
Next, run this batch file.

Dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /AnalyzeComponentStore
timeout 3 /NOBREAK
Dism.exe /online /cleanup-image /StartComponentCleanup

This is cleaning from slag using a flush system.
And zashlefuy everything with a standard cleaning of the system.
In general, in principle, these are just logs. For peace of mind , cut out this folder and throw it on some kind of storage. But I do not think that this will be a problem if they are simply removed. If an error pops up, at the same time you will find out what generates such logs (almost 2GB each, only Exchange likes to do this)