"Used Space" on my C: drive keeps automatically increasing

Couriant said:

Use TreeSize Free | JAM Software and run it in administrator mode. this will include system folders in its scan.

Best guess, Windows Updates is downloading into a cache file. This software should confirm it.

Also, do you or any other users on this have online storage syncing?

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Thanks, I'll jump on the other computer and download & run that in just a minute.

I stopped Windows Updates via running services. msc earlier today to see if that was the problem, but the disk space still kept increasing. I just wanted to point that out in case it might also be downloading somewhere else that I'm unaware of.

Is there a specific way I should sort TreeSize? Recently/currently modified/created files? I've never used it, so I thought I'd ask to help narrow down the time it would take to get me looking in the right direction.

I'm the only user on this computer. But as far as online storage goes, I guess I'm technically connected to OneDrive, but I dunno if anything is syncing & haven't had any issues like this since the other day. I did mention that while disconnected from the internet, I'm still having this issue, but it's worse when I am connected or just running simple Windows programs or SpaceSniffer(also seems to decrease C: drive space significantly while scanning), but nothing is ever freed up afterwards period.

Couriant said:

It should show you the most used folders on top. I would assume it will also be the last accessed to.

How much RAM do you have?

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After it stopped scanning it wasn't showing any file modifications, not sure if there is a live mode. Here are some screenshots. Docker & WSL are, and have been disabled for awhile now btw.

The trailing files that I left out were either not changed today, or have somewhere around 0.0% to 0.5% disk space usage:







And here are 2 before & after screenshots from my C Drive properties (5 seconds apart)


It seems to have slowed down for some reason after I booted it up to use TreeSize, but after restarting yesterday & today it hadn't. JUST this time. So I dunno.

Couriant said:

It looks like that Docker folder, or at least the WSL folder maybe the culprit. What app is associated to the Docker folder?

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Docker isn't really associated with anything, unless I need to use the Docker software to build images of certain applications. It's been disabled for awhile now, and although it took a lot of space up with just the installation, it really only was a RAM hog and that's about it.

WSL(Windows Subsystem for Linux) uses Microsoft Hyper-V that I used a few months ago with Docker to run a linux inside of Windows. A virtual machine I guess, which when it was initially installed & ran took up tons of RAM as well. But that's been disabled for a few months now.

For some reason, since booting up & running TreeSize, it seems like the only disk space that is being taken up at this point are some temp files. The "Used Space" is still increasing, but at a much lower rate, which I'm assuming is somewhat normal maybe?

It almost seems as if it's back to normal, but I don't wanna call it fixed and move on. This afternoon, I did a system update and ran a full chckdsk /r /f /x (which said it was "fixing" something) earlier, but nothing seemed to have changed at that point, so I shut it down again. About an hour or so later, since booting my laptop up right before downloading and running TreeSize, it seems to be acting normally. This is the first time since Saturday that it's seemed somewhat normal, so I'm not sure what to think.

Your thoughts?

Couriant said:

I would say keep an eye on the folders and see if any more increase. You are more than welcome to start a thread in the Malware forum to rule out anything that could be causing that.

Though I do find it strange that it would slow down after installing that software... Does your RAM show it's being fully utilized?

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The RAM is at about what it usually is (74%), which was never really the issue. But yeah, I think it's odd that it all of a sudden something stops eating up all my disk space. I was thinking MAYBE it had something to with chkdsk after a second reboot or something? It did say it was "fixing" something, but I dunno. No space was free'd up or anything, so I'm not sure where that was going to begin with.

I HOPE it isn't malware, I haven't downloaded anything suspicious at all aside from 2 widely used programs directly from their sites in the past few days. I did scan my laptop with Malwarebytes(free trial), but maybe I should try a full scan just to be sure.

The only thing I thought might have been out of the ordinary was installing Unity to my external SSD. This is the first time I've used my external SSD, and I don't know much about them to be honest, but for all I know something could have broken while running the installer on my local machine to install a 5G program to my external.

I'm just trying to throw out any information that could be of use. I feel like it's working "okay", temp files constantly being downloaded at a low rate is normal, right? I just have to be sure. I do feel uneasy though.