Lost 200gb Off My Hard Drive. Not Sure How To Get It Back.

I'm on an HP AMD A6-4400M APU laptop running on Windows 8.1, with 8 GB, and a 64-bit OS with an x64-based processor.

I was recently trying to produce a video in a program of mine, Camtasia Studio 7. Everything was running fine until the project hit 100%. Usually, that's when the process will end, and I'll be able to go back to look at the video clip in the program. However, when the project hit 100% this time around, it just stayed there on the dashboard and was frozen. I had to Ctrl+Alt+Delete the thing, went to the Task Manager, and killed the program from there.

In the time it took me to do that, my 765GB left went down to 545GB! Needless to say, I'm kind of worried about that, especially since I have no clue what is taking up that much space, where it is, and how to fix that. Any suggestions would be appreciated because this shouldn't be a malware issue as I had just ran a check of my own previously and everything checked out. Totally open to suggestions here. Yep.

 

When you use that program it will store the output in Temporary files. You need to look at those on your system and sort them by date order so you can pinpoint when you did the work. There should be a folder called Camrec

 

WinDirStat is one of my favorite programs. But, especially with large drives, it can be a bit intimidating at first. Here's a little tutorial that can help you interpret what you see.

That said, the first thing I recommend you do is clean out the clutter as that alone, will purge out many temp files that may include your space hog. Windows own Disk Cleanup is very effective, or another of my favorites, is CCleaner.

 

That was as easy as you all could've made it be. That WinDirStat program helped me locate and delete the incredibly large temp file like nothing. Once again, Majorgeeks saves me from a lot of stress. Thank you!

Also, I do like using CCleaner, but it wasn't able to locate said temp file during this process like WDS did. Still, thanks again, everyone.

 

Great! Glad you got it sorted out and thanks for posting your followup.