SSD drive partition is full but shouldn't be - Reclaim Missing Space

Earlier tonight I noticed one of my dedicated SSD partitions started to run out of room again. I had this issue for couple months now, but because I had ample of space left, I didn't think much of it. Well, I decided to run WinDirstat one more time to see if I had missed something. If you don't know the program, WinDirstat is a fantastic visualization tool for your files and folders. Very nice for visual people like myself, check out a screenshot below.






As you can see, all of my files under my P drive were not larger than 4.0 GB (for the past months I kept seeing that the used space was 30-38gb, not sure why my brain was seeing this). But if I go to my computer, I had only 0.97 GB of free space left!


Since I already had turned off the hibernating option, this culprit was out of the question. I also set my page file to a 500 MB limit. This wasn't the culprit either. As the last resort, I turned real quick to Google, you know, and found out why this was the case.

Windirstat

When I set my page file to 500 MB for my C drive way back, I also turned off system protection because I don't need the system to save the previous versions of my installed software. But what I forgot was to apply the same setting to my second partition, the P drive. Dummy Me! The system protection was literary using almost 25GB. Holy Moly!

Anyhow, I was able to pinpoint the issue, though it was due to my own negligence twice over. If you are also facing the same issue of many gygabytes of space missing, please follow the following steps:

I. Round up the usual suspects

1. Install and launch Windirstat to check which files or folders are taking up a lot of space
2. Make sure you have hibernating disabled. That should free up some space.
• You can do this by launching Command Prompt as an administrator and type: powercfg /hibernate off
• Press Enter
• 
3.  Set your system page file to a specific size. Mine is set at 500MB. 

 After the above house maintenance, let's get down to business:

II. My The Fix

1. Open Control Panel




2. Under System and Security, select System

3. On the left side bar, select System protection

 4. A new window will pop up, select the hard drive you would like to configure and click on Configure.








 No wonder 25 GB was missing. On top of my restore settings, my max usage was set at 100%.

5. Turn off System Protection or choose your own preference
 
6. Set the slider to the Max usage disk space you can tolerate







 

7. Click Apply and click OK for any prompt

And Voila! I finally see something that makes sense. No longer need to upgrade to a larger SSD---yet.

Special thanks to user Stumped.