Emptying Bin Doesn't Free Hard Drive Space

CCleaner for Windows
1

Forgive the somewhat cryptic title, but I don't really know how to describe this problem in a single line. This has been happening for awhile, and it usually clears itself up after a few days, but it's happening again right now and I figured I'd finally sign up here and see what's going on.

I only empty my recycling bin through CCleaner. Secure delete, 3 passes. Normally, about 80% of the time, it works fine. Files deleted, hard drive space instantly freed up. Now the other 20% of the time, the files will be deleted, but the hard drive space will not be increased. It stays unchanged, or in some instances it even drops even further. This will keep occuring for several days, and finally one day I'll wake up to find a few GB have been returned to me during the night, approximately adding up to everything I've deleted while the problem was persisting. Since it seems to have always been self-correcting, I never bothered for search for a solution before. I'm getting tired of it, though.

Does anyone else experience this? What causes it? Is there a manual solution?

(Win 7 64-bit, latest version of CCleaner)

2

There are two user conveniences that I would suspect as possibly being involved :-

System Restore and related etc.,

which should capture "protective copies" of essential system files (and anything it mistakes as such) when they are deleted.

It is obvious that it should be copied when it is deleted to oblivion,

BUT if deleted to the Recycle Bin there may be no urgency,

especially if there is a change of mind by the user who can RESTORE from the Recycle Bin.

PERHAPS the protective copy is deferred until the user chooses to EMPTY Recycle Bin, even if it is done via CCleaner Secure Delete

The "Distributed Link Tracking" Service,

which I understand allows the computer users to suffer no impact to their use of a remote networked file,

even when the system administrator to moves it from one server to another.

This service may well "keep tabs on" anything in the Recycle Bin,

and could give a "heads up warning" to System restore etc to COME NOW and make those deferred protective copies.

If I am guessing correctly, perhaps you would benefit by either setting "Distributed Link Tracking" Service to Manual (or even Disabled) instead of Automatic.

N.B.

D.T.L. absolutely ruined operation of Acronis Partition Image Backup software,

and Acronis would launch much faster without dozens of error messages when I stepped D.T.L. down to Manual,

and I never saw any downside to actually Disabling that service