Intentionally deleted content reappears

Running HP Pavillion Laptop Windows 7
I have deleted over 1 GB of files to make room for installing Windows 10. The system information (Local Disk) showed the newly available space for several days but now the same Local Disk information shows the same empty space (very little) as it did before my massive deletions. I am wondering what has happened here, have the deleted files been sent to some unknown place and just reappeared? If this is even possible where might I find the hidden archive so I can delete there also?
This has me totally stumped. Any thoughts will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

 

Are you sure they are the same files that came back?

Did you empty the recycle bin after deleting them?

How much total free space do you have?

 

Thanks for the response Bill. 14.1GB is the free space indicated at present. I did empty the recycle bin as I went along in deleting files. No, I do no know for certain that the files that 'came back' are the same as those deleted. The files I deleted are not present in the location they were in now but I was thinking that they might have been sent to some mysterious location, although I really have no idea how that could be. The total space on my hard drive is 465 GB, the total free space after the mass deletion was indicated temporarily to be 151.5 GB.
Thanks again Bill.

 

If you previously had 150+GB and now you have 14GB, and you didn't download or copy any files over, then something wrong is clearly going on.

For sure, scan for malware.

When you simply delete or erase files, they are not really deleted from your disk. They remain there and can easily be restored. They will remain there until you empty the Recycle Bin, or disk space becomes so limited, the OS will start saving new files in that space. But regardless, once deleted, the space should show as free, not used.

Automatic backups could easily eat up space but you can (or should be able to) tell the back up program how much to use (or how much to keep free).

You might try something like Folder Size, TreeSize and/or my favorite, WinDirStat to map out your drive(s) and see where the space is being used. But I caution, do not delete anything unless sure it is not needed by your system - Google it first.

 

Thank you Bill. I will search the areas you mention and hope that I might discover those sneaky items lurking where I can deal with them. I do backups to an external hard drive that is only connected at the time of backing up. I will check things to see if I did a backup on the internal hard drive, that could very well be the situation. Thank you.

 

Keep us posted.