Hard Drive Full – Check your backups

It seems as if the gremlins are really out to pull the wool over my eyes. One month it’s because my C drive was full of .sst files created by Google Earth, and this time it's my external drive. This is a 500Gb Seagate drive that I use for downloads, backups of my laptop and websites, and so on. I checked the drive with Explorer a couple of days ago (Windows 7 Home edition) and found that there was only 35Gbs of free space on the drive. The last time I recall checking there was far more. I ran JdiskReport and WinDirStat on the drive and each told me that only 119Gb was being used. Where was the discrepancy? 

It took me a while to work it out, some research through Google, unhiding my hidden files and so on. Then I realized what it was – there, in a folder named USER-PC. My laptop is set to backup every Sunday evening – and there were backups going back about 19 months, each measuring as much as 10Gbs. Deleting all but the latest three of the backup sets solved the problem. There is still a bit of a discrepancy between Explorer and other programs – apparently this could be due to the method Explorer uses to calculate used disk space – I have no intention of going into that.

Google filling up hard drives with Earth

I use a Lenovo G550 with Windows 7 Home edition, a laptop that is ideal for my writing skills. I do not do any gaming, but do make a lot of use of Skype, having family overseas, and of several web design aids. I was most disconcerted a couple of days ago when the laptop announced to me that its C drive was full, and that I should do something about it. Knowing that I had only used somewhat less than a quarter of the disc space led me to doing some investigation, where I found several other instances of the occurrence with other individuals. Liz advised me to check out a youtube video that listed the best ten system applications, which I did.

To isolate the problem I used an application called JdiskReport - you need Java to be running in order to run this program. The program analyzes your hard drive, giving a graphic description of what it contains. I found that almost 200 Gb was taken up by .sst files. Further analysis showed that there were more than a million .sst files in the Google Earth unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 directory, all created within a few minutes of each other. You can read about this problem on the GE forum here.

Uninstalling GE will not get rid of the unwanted files, which for me were found in C:\Users\xxxxxx\AppData\LocalLow\Google\GoogleEarth\unified_cache_leveldb_leveldb2 . Substitute your user name for the x's. You'll have to manually delete all of the  .sst files. I found the quickest way was to mark them using Ctrl and dragging the pointer over them, hitting delete and then later emptying the Recycle Bin. If you have a program such a Total Commander you can mark all the .sst files and delete them.  I later re-installed the latest version of GE , and now have 200 Gb of free space to play with again.(by the way GE know about the problem and are doing their best to fix it, but they need feedback from anyone experiencing it)