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WinDirStat shows 244GB unknown space on external drive

ayi

J'ai récemment noticed that one of my external disque dur seems to be missing beaucoup de space. It was recommended that I try WinDirStat, as it could help identify how much space each file was taking up. This is the result:

As vous pouvez see, there is about 244.7GB "unknown" usage.

Doing a bit of research online, the most common suggestion was (a) Recycle Bin and (b) System Volume Information.

(a) As vous pouvez see, empty. To double check, J'ai exécuté Disk Cleanup. It confirmed that it was empty. (Notez que a new file appeared by the time I took this screenshot, but it's only 129 Bytes.)

(b) Harder to tell. Cependant, according to various forums, the most common reason for System Volume Information to grow large is due to System Restore Files. I had a look, and it is definitely turned off for this drive, as seen here:

What else could be causing this issue? It is an enormous amount of storage to have gone missing!

ayi

Running Windirstat as Administrator will reveal most of this. In some cases it can be system protection files, corrupt files, old installers, or in my case, the Recycle Bin.

Per the Windirstat Propaganda Blog,

https://blog.windirstat.net/20061013/unknown-space/

This mysterious item is just the difference between what Windows
reports as the free space on the volume minus size of the files WDS
can access. Please note the part WDS can access! This is the important
point here. WDS cannot access the files under System Volume
Information on all the (NTFS?) drives, so it cannot sum up the sizes
of these items. And by the way, we have had reports of up to 30 GB of
“” space.

The root of le problème est permissions, apparently.