Okay, so today I’m gonna ramble about figuring out how big “zzz” actually is on my PC. It all started because I was cleaning up my drives (as one does), and saw this folder hogging a ton of space. I was like, “Wait, what even is this ‘zzz’ thing?”
First thing I did? Google, obviously. Typed in “what is zzz folder on pc” and got a bunch of stuff about temporary files, caches, and sometimes even malware. That definitely got my attention. I started getting paranoid, thinking I’d somehow downloaded something nasty.
Then, I dove into the folder itself. It was stuffed with what looked like random files and folders. Nothing obvious screamed “THIS IS EVIL!” But still, I was suspicious. Right-clicking on the “zzz” folder in Explorer and hitting “Properties” showed me the actual size: something like 50GB. Holy moly! That’s a lot of space for…mystery files.
Next, I wanted to see what was taking up the most space inside the “zzz” folder. So, I downloaded this free program called “WizTree.” It scans your drives and shows you a visual breakdown of which folders and files are the biggest. Super useful for this kind of detective work.
Ran WizTree, pointed it at the “zzz” folder, and BAM! It turns out the bulk of the space was being used by a bunch of HUGE video files. Like, multi-gigabyte HUGE. The filenames didn’t ring any bells at first. I tried opening one and…aha! It was footage from my screen recording software. I use it to record gameplay and tutorials sometimes.
Turns out, I had completely forgotten that I’d set the screen recorder to dump temporary files into that “zzz” folder. And I definitely forgot to clean them up. Years of recordings just sitting there, taking up space. Whoops!
So, what did I do? Started deleting the ones I didn’t need, of course! I went through them one by one, previewing them to make sure they weren’t anything important. Took a while, but I managed to free up a massive chunk of space. Probably could have automated the process somehow, but I wanted to be sure I wasn’t accidentally deleting anything valuable.
Lessons learned:
- Always know where your temporary files are going.
- Clean up your temp folders regularly. Seriously.
- WizTree is your friend.
After that, I went into my screen recording software’s settings and changed the default temp folder to something more obvious (and easier to remember to clean). Also set a limit on how much space it can use. Hopefully, this “zzz” incident won’t happen again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to defrag my drive. Peace!
