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Chrome downloads disk space issue

Started by Captain Z, February 18, 2021, 07:00:56 PM

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Captain Z

I had low-ish disk space, around 5GB free. Downloaded some episodes of a TV show to desktop from Mega using Chrome, filled up the disk space then cut and pasted the files to an external HD. But my C: drive is still full, even after restarting, ejecting the HD, looking inside Appdata\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache (empty). Any idea where those files might be hiding? (Not in recycle bin either.)

I'm sure I had this same problem ~6 months ago and fixed it easily, but can't remember what I did.

canadagoose

Assuming you're using Windows, would you consider running WinDirStat? It should tell you what is taking up all the space on your disk.

Captain Z

Might consider that for the future, but I found them. They were in a sub-sub folder of Appdata\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

canadagoose

Quote from: Captain Z on February 18, 2021, 08:23:19 PM
Might consider that for the future, but I found them. They were in a sub-sub folder of Appdata\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\File System. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Oh, that's good! Incomplete downloads, or just some other bloat?

Captain Z

Definitely some weird residual of the downloaded files as there were six of them, all matching the size in MB of the videos. Forget what extension they had and the filenames were gibberish. Found just by checking properties of folders in turn to see which one contained the 4.9GB.

Malcy

It's a Mega thing. I've noticed it downloads from Mega  and then properly downloads to the disk. Usually at a fast rate. Seems like for some reason it never deleted the temp version of the files.

JesusAndYourBush

Everything you download with mega goes in that hidden folder and stays there.  Anyone who uses mega should probably find the folder and empty it from time to time, or download with the command line program megatools and bypass their kooky way of downloading altogether.

touchingcloth

Quote from: canadagoose on February 18, 2021, 08:49:59 PM
Oh, that's good! Incomplete downloads, or just some other bloat?

Like others have said, it's mega-specific bloat. I guess they do it so that incomplete downloads can be resumed?

JesusAndYourBush

I only discovered mega cached everything when I re-downloaded something I'd downloaded several years earlier and had since deleted, and a 300mb file downloaded instantly - because the cached files were already hidden - so it only needed to copy it out of the hidden folder.

olliebean

In Firefox, Mega downloads are cached in RAM and then decrypted to disk. I'm guessing in Chrome the encrypted files are stored on disk and then not deleted after decryption.

H-O-W-L

Quote from: olliebean on February 20, 2021, 08:10:38 PM
In Firefox, Mega downloads are cached in RAM and then decrypted to disk.

That explains so fucking much.