Losing hard drive space...

I bought an F572 80 GB HD and Windows vista premium. Here's what's happening. I have an 80 GB drive and after I got rid of the partition i had 54 GB.
I installed a few programs totaling 750 MB's and some photos and music of about 1.1 GB. Anyway I was happy at about 52 GB. A few days later it was at 47 GB and now my HD reads 43 GB and I did not add anything....what the heck is going on here?

 

Is the total hard drive space decreasing or are you talking free space?

 

i think it's making a bunch of restore points.

 

Yeah, but to lose GB's of space every several days? A while back Vista detected a problem with the HD partition [allocated] space....how do i get back to that "repair" program? i am not really familiar with Vista AT ALL.....i have been using Xp at work and home for 4-5 years.

 

I'm having the same issues with my 9500t! Just yesterday I had about 61.3 GB Free of 84.8 GB, and this morning, I am down to 57.9 GB. I didn't download anything overnight! Whats going on?

 

Yes, it's definitely the System Restore wasting your space, and also Shadow Copies. To check, go ahead and do a Disk Cleanup.

Apply to both Vista and XP:

Start - Accessories - System Tools - Disk Cleanup - Select your current Hard Drive (Should be default C: )

After it's done calculating, a new window will pop out, click on "More Options" tab at top, then you will see the section of "System Restore and Shadow Copies", then click on "Clean Up..." and confirm "Delete"

Caution: Do NOT click on "OK" to close the window, Click on "Cancel"

And now go and check your disk space and see if you have gained more space or not.

 

Check out This Article on DownloadSquad. Specifically addresses this issue on notebooks and how to fix it.

Hope this helps.

 

What's most likely happening here is a combination of System Restore and Shadow Copies.

By default in Vista, once a day a restore point is made by the system. This allows you to "restore" your system to a state it was in before an even happened (i.e. buggy software). This only affects system related files, not your data.

Shadow Copies are made at the same time the daily System Restore is run. What this does is create a backup copy of any data files you have altered since the last System Restore point. This allows you to go back to a previous version of a file if you need to. Right-click any file that's been changed recently and click on the "Previous Versions" tab, you will see what I'm talking about.

These two features will eat up a lot of disk space (up to 15% . If you don't want this to happen you can turn off System Restore or you can free up space by running Disk Cleanup and deleting old System Restore points.

Hope this helps.

 

TomTom, you just made my day! I went back up to 63.5 GB of free space! I appreciate it!

 

Do I also want to do this to my HP Recovery drive?

 

No. You don't ever have to worry about D: drive
Since it's only for Recovery, it doesn't write new data, nor can you delete anything off that drive.

 

Just free'd up another 5GB on my harddrive! Thanks a bunch sanpablo!

 

Wow...I'm up to 52.7 GB from 42.9...Now I need how to control this "restore point".
Thanks again!!!

 

Read the article as mentioned before, it has steps on how to reduce the amount of space that can be used by system restore. For Vista.

I tried it when I first got Vista, it worked out great. Be aware that the less space you set for System restore, the less restore points you have!

Article link:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2007/0...k-space-used-by-windows-vista-system-restore/

 

shadow storage max was 22gb on my notebook