Windows 10 (and, I think, since Vista) makes a lot of softlinks. Such that My Pictures, My Documents and the like are 'present' under different folders/directories in ways that can be counted by folder-sizing (righthclick properties or even
DIR /S) that they never were when they were just shortcuts. If My Pictures is softlinked under My Documents (I don't have an example to test, right now, but I wouldn't be surprised) then you'd get everything in the former listed under the latter's interogation. And if you checked both "My"s under the folder (or virtual folder object) that modern Windows tries to insist is your "home" folder) in a single action then it
might even double-count contents as it follows both softl8nks and all softlinks beneath.
Can't test this, right now (I don't have
any Windows machines within easy reach, and those within nearest non-eqsy reach ate 2K and XP, far more honest about these things), but I suspect the commandline
DIR /S /A-L foo would look at the cummulative size of "foo" without following any symbolic links.
If "foo" is a directory, it'll list all things under that (that aren't softlinked) and give you a bytes total at the end. A true idea of the contents. If you're in a (hypothetical) "...\my documents\projects" directory you can
DIR /S /A-L project2 for the "...my documents\projects\project2" directory contents, without (I'm imagining) following any shared-data link that might have been set up (maybe with
XCOPY /B ... ... type command, or application/installation equivalent system call) to give access to the same subordinate recerence directory as "project1" has (or was similarly linked to).
If it's only a potential file-name (or a wildcard match) then it'll traverse all directories from here (or the path you prepend it) to try to find that. A different example is
DIR /A-D /S /B /L \*.txt which I might use to list (in bare and lowercase format) all .txt files below the root (\) of the current drive. (The
/A-D says don't
list directories... as if I'd expect any directoriew to have a .txt extension (they can, of course!) ... but handily gets around the default "don't dive into hidden/system directories" behaviour because it will now search through them all.) In your case, if you think you know that you've got some particularly large (say) .avi files squirreled away somewhere under F:\JUNK, you might therefore use
DIR /A-L /S F:\JUNK\*.avi and it'll show only those things truly
somewhere under there and not via some link over to C: or elsewhere in F:... ((I presume, I must add.))
...because these commands (potentially) give a huge long list of contents (and, without the "/B" (bare-format) tag used, in sequential directory header, unqualified contents and directory footer), either redirect to a file with
command > list.txt, to then let you
notepad list.txt/similar to peruse at leisure, or else
command | FIND "File(s)" to pipe through and reduce to only the individual directory footer lines (e.g. "101 File(s) 393,792,816 bytes", which you can use to spot possibly large groups of files in particular subdirs, but need to go hunting to find out
which) and the final "totalising line" at the end that might say "320 File(s) 3,132,297,216 bytes" which is the cumulative count of everything matched (now filtered out). Obviously the
command is your chosen DIR-form command. (Also, not so obviously, if any file(s) matches "File(s)" then they'll also pop up on the FIND-filtered list. Should be rate enough to not matter. But you could always use the "/L" (lowercase) tag, so that FIND won't match filename lines now with "file(s)", without adding the "/I" (ignore case) to that, of course.
)
The "/B" (bare format) for DIRectory listing doesn't give
any filesize info, but usefully makes each line fully-qualified to path so a line-filtering FIND can extract all files that have the letters "xyz" in them, anything somewhere under (any) "\old\" directory listing or you can filter out (/V) things of no interest (
bare command | FIND /V /I ".exe" | FIND /V /I ".od" | FIND /V /I ".bak" | FIND /I "budget" will take the bare (DIR /B ...) listing and strip it of any line looking like a .exe, all the open-document formats (.ods, .odt, etc), a .bak file (but also anything and everything under a directory with .bak extensio , which is not unknown) before then presenting all remaining lines that have "budget" (or "BUDGET" or "Budget", etc) in them. If you have a good idea what ought to be in a directory(-structure) or are content to selectively whittle away a long list as repeatedly generated in a command line, you can just keep piling on further piped FINDs to exclude/narrow down the list. I repeat, this doesn't help at all with size information (on a bare DIR listing) but may be of use tracking down things you think should (or shouldn't be)
somewhere under a directory structure. e.g. finding that there's something under "...\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files\Content.IE
whatever\
alphanumeric spaghetti name\..." (or more current equivalent cache space, obviously) that stands out for some reason.
TL;DR - Open command line and start with
DIR /AD \ to list all (even hidden) root directories. Then for each of them (dir1, dir2, ...) do something like
DIR /A-B /S \dirX | FIND "File(s)" and take note of the final line. Then
DIR /AD \dirX for any interestingly large ones and then
DIR /A-L /S \dirX\subdirY | FIND "File(s)" and onwards like that.
Noting that you'll be initially delving into system folder structures that are going to be legitimately large
anyway, and some bits of these aren't suitable for being ripped out for archival/deletion, so use your common sense, but further subordinate parts might indeed be cruft that you don't need to keep. Or restrict yourself to whatever the Documents And Settings folder is currently called (with special attention, when you see them, to Desktop, Favorites and possibly Address Book, as I've seen large files dragged-and-dropped into these locations by misclicks on various occasions, usually this then making the user think that the original file has vanished (not moved) from the original Documents area, but occasionally it can be copied).
Anyway, have a play with this, see if it even works (for you), but take it under advisement whether to move/delete the things that you find. Leaving alone System, System32, System64 and/or whatever under the WINDOWS (or WIN, WINNT, whatever), directory is probably advisable,
unless you're solving a different issue, and know how to do it. But it doesn't hurt to look around. Then if you discover an "installSoftware.temp" type subfolder for something (that you know about, or otherwise) then you can start checking to see if the 4GB of files that the 3D compositting package left there is truly supposed to still be there after installation (or especially after deinstallation) or search for what might else have left such a mucky footprint on your system and whether you should be concerned about it. Knowledge is power. (Action can be dangerous, though, without additional knowledge to back it up. This is just a general point, however, and doesn't affect my core suggestion.)
(Edited for markup typos. Other grammatical/lexical typos definitely exist, but seems not to intrude into actual commands being quoted, so not spending time on such irrelevencies.)
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