Today I helped a customer who’d almost run out of space on his ‘C:’ drive, but wasn’t sure why. His laptop was a powerful model with two drives installed rather than the usual one. The primary drive was a solid-state drive, which was very fast though quite small. The secondary drive was a traditional hard disk drive, which was slower though much larger. For speed, Windows 10 and all the customer’s programs were installed on the solid-state drive, and the secondary drive was only used for storing data. The customer hadn’t installed any new programs recently, so it wasn’t obvious where all the space on the solid-state drive had gone. However, it was important to find out what was happening, as Windows can’t operate efficiently when there’s hardly any drive space left.
The first thing to do was create some ’elbow room’, and my favourite program for getting rid of unnecessary files to free up space is ’CCleaner’. Trying to install more software on a system that’s already nearly full doesn’t make much sense, but ’CCleaner’ is available as a portable program that can be run from a USB flash memory drive. Running ’CCleaner’ in that way allowed us to get rid of 1,313 MB of unnecessary files, and that was enough to unchoke the system while we found out what was really happening.
There’s a free program called ‘WinDirStat’ that’ll analyse any drive and show you which files and folders are taking up a significant amount of space. As we now had enough ‘elbow room’ to install a small program, we downloaded and installed ‘WinDirStat’ then set it running to analyse the contents of the ‘C:’ drive. The analysis took quite a long time, but there were other things the customer wanted to discuss while it was happening, so the time wasn’t wasted. However, sometimes there just isn’t anything else to do, so you just have to wait. That’s the nature of computer troubleshooting.
After waiting for a long time, ‘WinDirStat’ finished its analysis of the ‘C:’ drive, and among all the reasonably sized folders we soon found one called ‘C:\Users\bob\AppData\Local\Livedrive’ that contained 41.8 GB of data. A little research soon revealed that ‘Livedrive’ was the actual name of the system that is marketed by Curry’s PC World as ‘Team Knowhow Cloud Backup’. The customer had signed up for online (i.e. ‘cloud’) storage when he bought the laptop, and it’d proved to be very useful over the past few years. However, accessing large amounts of data by downloading it from the cloud on demand can be slow, so ‘Livedrive’ was keeping local copies of everything hidden away (i.e. ‘cached’) on the ‘C:’ drive for quick access.
The simplest solution would be to move the ‘Livedrive’ local data cache from the ‘C:’ solid-state drive to the much larger ‘D:’ hard disk drive. ‘Livedrive’ allows you to change various settings, but not all of them, so I went for a more basic approach. The Windows Registry is a database containing settings for just about everything in a Windows system. When the ‘Livedrive’ software was installed, the installer program would’ve entered in the registry a bundle of settings to do with ‘Livedrive’, so maybe we just needed to find them and make one or more adjustments. I started up the Registry Editor program that’s built into Windows, and under ‘HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Livedrive\Users\bob’ found a setting called ‘CacheLocation’. This was initially set to the standard ‘C:\Users\bob\AppData\Local\Livedrive’, but we wanted to change it to be somewhere on the ‘D:’ drive instead.
Before making any changes to the registry, we had to close down the running ‘Livedrive’ software. We then used the Registry Editor program to change the ‘CacheLocation’ to be ‘D:\LivedriveCache’. We could then have copied all 41.8 GB of data from ‘C:\Users\bob\AppData\Local\Livedrive’ to ‘D:\LivedriveCache’ before restarting the ‘Livedrive’ software, but in the end decided not to bother, because the local cache would be rebuilt automatically as information stored in the cloud was accessed on demand. Once we’d verified that the cache was gradually being rebuilt in the new location a bit at a time, we deleted the old cache that was clogging up the ‘C:’ drive, which then showed 58.9 GB used and 44.1 GB free. We could then stop worrying about the ‘C:’ drive being almost out of space.