unexpected space on main (boot-up) hard drive

A few hours ago, I received a warning from my PC (specs in signature below) of low space in my main (boot-up) hard drive (HD). The remaining capacity was about 480MB. I had been expecting the low space warning for a day or so; earlier today the indicated remaining space was 4.7GB before I had downloaded files totalling some 4GB. I copied some large files totalling 13GB from my main HD to an external HD. I attended to other activities and about 30 minutes later, after the 13GB of files were copied, but before I dumped them from the main HD, I checked the remaining space again and was very surprised to find I now had over 48GB of space in my main HD. I'm fairly certain I did not delete any other files from my main HD and a spot check showed no files were missing. I did not receive any notices of my PC deleting any unauthorized files.

I know I may not find a definite answer, but I am curious--any suggestions or speculation as to how the space on my main HD zoomed from 480MB to over 48GB in some 30 minutes?

Thank you for reading and any advice.

Ken

 

Restore/pagefile settings?

 

Please pardon my ignorance, what are these and how do they relate to hard drive space?

Thanks,
Ken

 

System restore creates a compressed images of your HDD to restore windows if something happens. This takes a percentage of you HDD. Page file is the reserve of HDD space for if the system runs out of ram, I believe default is 2x ram amount. Changing these settings affects free space.

 

OPen task scheduler library in VISTA maybe there is a utitily running in the background that is freeing up space.
verify the size and settings of your virtual memory (AKA page file)

 

I think the main issue with Vista was it's overtly liberal shadow volume feature (system restore backups) that had a tendency to eat up most if not all of your available space on the partition where the OS is.
The first thing I did in Vista to mitigate the problem was to reduce the shadow volume size to a few GB... (2 or 3 I think) and I never experienced issues with running out of free space mysteriously.

It's possible your Vista finally managed to fill the remaining free space as much as it could and then decided to 'dump' the old system restores (except the most recent one ).
Ultimately, it's a shot in the dark so I have no clue what happened.

But you can always check the shadow volume size using proper commands and limit it to a specified amount.

 

Thanks much for the suggestions and advice. At least I know plausible reasons exist for the space jump on my hard drive. Please pardon my ignorance again--how do I access page file and shadow volume settings?

Ken

 

PAge file (AKA virtual memory)- Change the size of virtual memory (Page file size) in Vista | Windows Reference
IF it is set to auto manage (1st box checked) I would not change it unless you have a good reason.
Setting it to a very small custom size can result in Virtual memory errors when running some programs

Shadow Volume http://www.ehow.com/how_2266929_reduce-shadow-copy-windows-vista.html
I set mine to 5 GIG (80 Gig hard drive running VISTA)


~~Thanks Deks , I did not know this could be changed!

 

Josea-

Thanks for the explanations. As you suggested, I'll set the virtual memory to auto-manage.

Ken