windows 2016 server hard drive is filling up every night

Question

My windows 2016 server (essentials) is beginning to fill up the hard drive every night. I feel like there is something running that is causing this. My client backups are backing up to a separate external hard drive. Both hard drive are 1 Tb. What could be causing this?

Answer 1

We have no visibility into your server so the odds of us being able to help are slim without more information. For starters have you identified what files are being created that fill up the drive? This will pretty much tell you where the problem is. For example if there are lots of temp files being created then look at the temp files to see who is creating them.

If instead it is something like event log files then I'd say you have not configured the event logs to overwrite old events.

If you cannot easily determine where the space is going then use something Disk Cleanup to see if it is temp files or cache files. If that doesn't reveal anything obvious then try a third party tool like dirstat or windirstat. Cleaning up the drive and then running it across 2 days should give you an idea of what files are abnormal.