How Many Files Are On Your PC?

Back in October, I made a post that was half a whine-fest, but carried information about a special tool that saved me more than once from breaking down and crying like a little girl who just dropped her fresh ice cream. TestDisk was the application, and I recommend reading the post, because if you ever run into the instance where it would come in handy (and chances are, you will), you are going to want to know about it.

That aside, although TestDisk recovered my partition and allowed me to get back all of my data, I found out later on that half of my music collection had new-found skips, which was a result of my screw-up. Bad news, since it meant I had to re-rip my entire collection, which is something else I relayed through our news section. It took exactly one month, but I managed to re-rip my entire music collection to FLAC, and the time came to actually back it up this time.

So I ran out (sat in my comfortable chair and ordered it online) to pick up a Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 1TB drive, which was to serve the purpose of off-loading some of the data on my NAS box and also my main storage drive. It was also to serve the purpose of added backup… something I should have thought harder about in the past. That all said, the installation was great, and I now keep three exact copies of the music collection, so save for the house burning down, I should be good.

What this post is about isn’t about that exactly, though. Since I was a wee bit bored and decided to mess around with the computer, I decided to check to see how many files could be found on the entire computer. Last time I remember doing something like this was back when I used Windows XP full-time. Then, I think the total was around 300,000 total files, which was incredible. To picture that many individual files on a single PC was a little staggering.

To my surprise though, things are even crazier nowadays, although I’m sure this will be on a case-per-case basis. After scanning my entire machine (90,000 files are a result of Techgage backups), the total was 1.2 million… staggering. No matter how you look at it, THAT’S a lot of freakin’ files. So, how many files do you have on your PC? It’s definitely a useless metric, but it’s fun nonetheless. For Windows, you could simply bring up a search and point it to your main system drive, or all drives in your PC, then use ‘*.*’, without quotes, as the search term. Prepare to wait a little while after pushing go.