I have an extra logical drive (separate from C: ) that holds my personal data, you know, pictures, home videos, personal documents etc. This drive, E:, has for the last year or so always shown up in explorer with red a red disk space indicator bar. (There was about 20GB of free space left). Well, recently I copied, oh, about 8 GB of new pictures and videos from my laptop over onto the E: drive. Then, I was watching one of the videos when explorer crashed. When it came back up, I pressed "Windows Key + E" to get an explorer window and the disk space indicator bar was no longer red, in fact there is now 90 GB of extra space. I am concerned that lots of my personal files were deleted. I've looked around and have not noticed any missing files, but how can I know? (Event viewer didn't show anything suspicious.)
So, what could cause my E: drive to suddenly gain LOTS of extra hard disk space? (I think about 70 GB). I've been thinking that during/after I copied the new files to the E: drive, Windows 7 saw disk space getting low, so it decided that some files (maybe the search index?) would have to be moved to a different logical drive. Is this even possible? I checked the index settings, it says the index lives on C:, is it possible it _was_ on E: but recently was automatically moved?
I do have a backup of all of the data, but restoring data isn't fun. It will be time consuming, and I don't even know yet if I lost anything.
What else could be the cause of sudden extra hard drive space? (I did not empty the recycle bin, it still has files in it from months ago.)