Windows 10: Windows 10 cleaned up my Hard Drive?

I just upgraded to W10 from W7 less than a week ago. So far it's been great, no problems (fingers crossed)

But I have a question about the hard drive: it now has a LOT more free space than it did. The upgrade removed over 200GB from it. I have checked all my docus and media, everything is there (I mostly store media on externals anyway).

I always performed HDD cleanup, but could I have missed that much junk? So far I'm grateful for the space W10 has cleaned up

:)

 

Accidently cleaned my entire system hard disk while I was installing windows 7

I was using Windows 10 and I wanted to install windows 7 for study purpose. When I was cleaning a partion for windows 7 by typing disk part in command prompt. But accidentally I cleaned the Entire hard disk. There were drivers images important documents
etc. Can somebody help me to get my Windows 10 and personal data back..??

***Post moved by the moderator to the appropriate forum category.***

 

Accidently cleaned my entire system hard disk while I was installing windows 7

There are third-party programs you can try, such as Recuva at Download Recuva | Recover deleted files, free!

They may or may not work for you. If they don't, there are several professional data recovery services you can try, but be aware that they are *very* expensive, and they also may or may nor work.

Drivers shouldn't be a problem, since you can always download them again, but regarding data, you apparently don't back it up to external media. If that's the case, you've been playing with fire. You are always susceptibleto many of the most
common dangers: severe power glitches, nearby lightning strikes, virus attacks, even theft of the computer.

In my view, secure backup needs to be on removable media, and not kept in the computer. For really secure backup (needed, for example, if the life of your business depends on your data) you should have multiple generations of backup, and at least one
of those generations should be stored off-site.

My computer isn't used for business, but my personal backup scheme uses two identical removable hard drives, I alternate between the two, and make a complete copy of the primary drive.

I also use a pair of 16GB thumb drives for making more frequent backups of my most critical data (like financial information). For that I just drag and drop.

As has often been said, it is not a question of *whether* you will lose all your data, but when.

 

That does seem a surprising amount of space to have re-acquired!

W10 does include a lot of automatic processes that run in the background, including disk cleanup.

Enjoy!

 

My guess is that it was probably old Windows 7 restore points and updates. You might want to be aware that restore points are turned off by default in Windows 10, so if you want restore points you need to go back to settings and turn them on.

 

Thanks for the reminder, I did not know about this! *Wink