Windows 10: I have a massive and constantly growing "Unknown" file I can see in WinDirStat that is...

As the title says, huge unknown file that is continually spreading. I've done every virus scan on the the planet both offline and on. Full scans result in no malware.Ive gotten ride of all non-essential apps and reinstalled windows 11 with no fix. I havent done a complete clean format of the drive but I would love assistance in finding out what this issue is.And another screenshot taken an hour later:As shown the size of the file constantly expands. When I restart my PC that value drops.This Unknown space is taking up storage in my DISK and completely filling while also slowing down the rest o

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Cannot locate or delete WinDirStat files

So, I was wondering why my 1TB HDD was down to 11GB after I had only used 72GB for games and whatnot. I looked around on some other forum threads and found out that I could use WinDirStat to discover any unknown files if they happened to be on my hard drive. As it shows in my first screenshot, there are 848GB of unknown files.





I was then reading more about how to delete or figure out what these files could be. Many people suggested to use TreeSize, so I checked that out.





And nothing...
Does anyone have any ideas on what this could be and how I could get rid of it?

 

WinDirStat shows 244GB unknown space on external drive

I recently noticed that one of my external hard drive seems to be missing a lot of space. It was recommended that I try WinDirStat, as it could help identify how much space each file was taking up. This is the result:





As you can see, there is about 244.7GB "unknown" usage.

Doing a bit of research online, the most common suggestion was (a) Recycle Bin and (b) System Volume Information.

(a) As you can see, empty. To double check, I ran Disk Cleanup. It confirmed that it was empty. (Note that a new file appeared by the time I took this screenshot, but it's only 129 Bytes.)

(b) Harder to tell. However, according to various forums, the most common reason for System Volume Information to grow large is due to System Restore Files. I had a look, and it is definitely turned off for this drive, as seen here:





What else could be causing this issue? It is an enormous amount of storage to have gone missing!

 

Cannot locate or delete WinDirStat files

Did you run WinDirStat and Treesize as administrator?

WinDirStat shows stuff it isn't authorised to as "unknown" (see here) and I see 5 directories in your Treesize screen-print it can't access.

If you run as administrator and are still having issues then click on the link where it says "5 Errors" at the bottom of Treesize and see what it says :





It does look like some permissions thing.