I'm running out of space on my D: drive, which I mainly use for Steam games. I had already uninstalled most of my games and removed the remaining large ones, keeping only Baldur's Gate and a few smaller games, but the free space barely changed. WinDirStat appeared to account for only about 341 GB on a drive that should have roughly 1.8 TB available. I also checked the partitions in Disk Management, but nothing looked obviously wrong. What could be taking up the missing space, and how can I find it safely?
3 Answers
If the scan still looks wrong, check the Steam library's storage view and compare it with the folders under the library's steamappscommon directory. Uninstalled games can sometimes leave folders behind, but don't format the drive unless you've confirmed that you have backups and have identified the data you want to remove.
WizTree is another good option for checking disk usage, and it should also be run as an administrator. It scans quickly and can make unusually large folders easier to spot. Before deleting anything, verify what the files are, since some may be needed by Windows or another application.
Run WinDirStat as an administrator by right-clicking it and choosing the administrator option. Without elevated access, it may not be able to scan protected folders, so the results can look much smaller than the actual amount of data on the drive.
That fixed it. WinDirStat now shows the full 1.8 TB, and it turns out a large collection of old backups was using most of the space. Thanks for the help!