Thursday, January 24, 2008

WTF? Low on Disk Space?

It was unbelievable. Windows XP told me that I was running out of disk space. True enough, the drive showed that it had a couple hundred thousand bytes left, so I went to check each of the folders in my system partition. I used to have difficulty filling up my 10 Gb partition because of my mean-and-lean philosophy. Now this. I found out that

C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\NCH Swift Sound\Scribe\Current

used up 338 Mb of my drive space but was cleared on exit, and

C:\Documents and Settings\xxx\Application Data\NCH Swift Sound\Scribe\Done

had accumulated all the previous temporary files and by now had used up 5.13 Gb. WTF?

Apparently, Express Scribe uses *.ra and other audio files to create temporary *.wav, *.txt, and *.dat files. So this means that it bloated the 7.08 Mb files to 300+ Mb. When I clicked the Done icon, the said files were moved to the Done directory. Those files stay there until you delete them. Well, it's like having a backup, but if you don't know this, you'll find yourself without any disk space left.