Windows 10 Search Index ate my hard drive!

[Draco1962]

I have been racking my brains trying to find out where in the heck I was losing 468 GB of storage on my 500 GB drive. I was able to determine where (System Files) but other than that without having to drill into many paths and files. 

I followed the directions here and downloaded TreeFree and was able to quickly find a monster windows.edb file. I then had to stop the windows search service to free access to the file. Doing so via Services would not work so had to go Command Line options to stop and restart the service and then delete the file via TreeFree and then permanently delete it via Recycle Bin.

It will be interesting to see if the file grows to that size again, however, I believe there was a lot of remnant stuff from Windows 8 upgrade to 10 coupled with the abundance of drives and changes over the last 5+ years.

[RIP-Felix]

I've had problems with that too. My OS drives always fill up over time leaving me precious little space, when I wasn't using it up. Android OS is especially rude about it too, complaining that my apps are taking it up when they most certainly are not. It's Android cumulative updates that are doing it. Windows has the WinSXS and installer folders, which grow unnecessarily big. Supposedly deleting files here can cause system instability, but a fresh install fully updated doesn't take up nearly as much space. So that explanation never sat well with me. Currently, they take up 17 of 38 GB my Windows folder. I can excuse the 12GB hiberfile.sys and 16GB pagefile.sys, because they perform useful roles and don't increase in size over time. But the other 2 piss me off. Android is worse though. They blame it on user installed apps, when it updates and system files doing it! They fill up and the phone or tablet slows down, making people assume it's just old and slow, so they buy a new one. Instead of cleaning up the files or providing larger OS drives that will not fill up so quickly, they like people buying a new device every 2 years when their device unnecessarily bloats to a crawl. It should be illegal to exploit people's technical ignorance like this.

I downloaded that TreeSize free app, very useful. I had been right clicking properties on every file to track down the hogs one-by-one. This is much easier!

[Draco1962]

Windows.edb was what was killing me. I may see if there's any real benefit to keeping the indexing running or not.

[RIP-Felix]

When I looked into it, indexing was really meant for slow OS HDDs, where it took a long time to search for a file. Indexing helped speed the search up. If you use the search function alot, on HDD, then it could be useful still...but why? I don't use my HDDs that way. I use them to store my media, which I have organized in file structures that make sense. Indexing is more useful for an OS drive where the files you're looking for are buried in Microsoft's nonsensical file structure. If you're not already using an SSD for your OS (in 2020), you should be. On an SSD the extra writes from indexing just wear it out faster. An SSD is plenty fast for search functions as is. So I really don't see the point of indexing anymore. Other than causing problems and confusion.

[Draco1962]

My OS is a 500 GB Samsung Evo SSD. Most searches I have are on the ancillary HDDs looking for media, but even that is rare since buying a laptop a few years ago.

No real need for the search service so will disable it..