Properties on Win10 over-reading by a massive amount

[Derek Smith]

Win 10 Pro

I’m just going through my annual clear up of HDDs.

I have three HDDs on my desktop: a 2T B for OS and temporary files, a 3 TB which I use for everything apart from the material which I put on my second 3 TB disc, which is images and video. On the first, variable matter, 3 TB I have a folder where I keep non work related information. It contains documents, a few images and 6.6 GB of video. The total should be less than 10 GB.

I clicked on Properties on the folder. It now reads:

Size: 9.84 TB (10,821,773,942,352 bytes)
Size on disk: 9.85 TB (10,832,226,377,728 bytes)
Contains: 9,433,492 Files, 736,737 Folders

I have about 35 folders in that one folder.

I’ve done it twice, with identical results.

Properties shows as normal on other folders on that HDD and on the other 3 TB HDD.

Can anyone explain? I’m really confused.

[anonymous-user]

Bizzarely I had the opposite situation when looking at network folders
I started a thread on it last year (cant be bothered looking for it) and I underwent several solutions ranging from recopying the folder to reinstalling windows
It turned out later on that there was a bug in that version of Windows that caused it. The folders still reported major size differences and it was only cured by an eventual later build of Windows 10

What I did find was this
Say the folder is called Daves music (it was) if I clicked on properties I got a size report of say 320 GB whereas it was actually higher
But If I went into the folder and duly opened it and highlighted and scrolled down all the artists then clicked properties on that it reported the size accurately
I wonder if your issue may report the same differences ?

[anonymous-user]

Actually Derek have you checked the folder size with the treesize utility ?

[Derek Smith]

Thanks for the replies

techiedave said:

Actually Derek have you checked the folder size with the treesize utility ?

No. What I've done is to copy individual folders to an external HDD and then wipe the folder. It relieved 195 GB which, oddly enough, was not quite exactly the same as the total of the files I'd backed up. I then pasted the folder back into the desktop HDD and lost 195 GB. So back to more or less normal but it would appear that one should not trust the Properties facility.

I do an automatic backup of files every months, but I've been rearranging my storage to cope with a new venture so thought I'd back up manually, just in case. I was copy pasting when a Windows fault came up to say that I hadn't got enough space, which I knew was wrong. I thought that I'd better check, just in case, and there was the reading.

>9 TB on a sub-folder in a 3 TB disc yet I still checked.

I'm going to run Chrome OS on an old laptop, just to try. I was told it was not entirely dependable. Just like Win10 then.