Hard drive space mysteriously used.

I have been playing with my new Lenovo U330 notebook PC. Great little machine so far. It is running Vista 32bit with 4GB RAM

I have two partitions, one for Vista and programs, the other for data. My Vista partition is 100GB, data is 140GB (250GB HDD).

My Vista partition says "36.8GB Free of 97.7GB". I did a file properties, with all hildden and system files exposed (pagefile and hibernate specifically), and it's only about 38GB used. I did a treesize free run and it shows the samething. Where has my mysterious file space disappered to? So I'm using about 30GB with something that doesn't exist!?

Any ideas?

 

You using photoshop by any chance? that program frequently eats a lot of my space. It is in the temp file of your user directory

 

system restore, i'd say...

i normally disable it as i have a good automatic backup system. you should see much free space after you disabled it for a moment.

my suggestion: disable it, then re-enable it and configure it to use less space. to do so, lets check google:

voilà

 

Thanks, but this system is new with only a couple small apps that I installed.

I did the vssadmin command as suggested and says "No items found that satisfy the query".

I go to System Restore, and it says there's no restore points set yet.

I run the option to resize it and it says "Error: The specified volume shadow copy storage association was not found."

Also, that link is incorrect. The correct syntax is 'vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage'. They omitted the 'ShadowStorage' part.

 

Ok, strange. I disabled System Restore and rebooted. No change. I enabled it, rebooted, no change. I disabled again and rebooted, now that 30GB portion of mystery missing hard drive space is free again!

I reactivated System Restore and rebooted. I did the command lines as suggested on that site, and it says max size is 14GB, but only 78MB used. I reset it to 5GB max. Seems to be fine now.

Thanks for the help. Just seems like an odd thing.

 

hm yeah, it sure was messed up somehow. happy it helped.

i was unsure about the link as i never really read what i've copy pasted

i don't use system restore at all anymore as i have windows home server now, but i've used it in the past. so far, i've seen quite a performance gain by disabling it. no clue if it's placebo or for real..

 

I've never used it either. Actually, I stopped using it years back when it actually FUBAR'd my PC and had to reinstall anyhow. Figured I'd give it another go. Some people swear up and down how great it is.

 

nice!! i'm having the same problem. Will do what you suggested in a while.

 

There is an awesom program out there that does just about any thing you would want to do maint wise. It'sCalled Vista Manager and I really can't say enough about it. I forget how long the trial period lasts sine I got my copy "registered" now. I think you get 30 days?

Anyway, one of the many things you can access is changing the size of the restore/shadow size as well as how often your puter makes a restore point. Without having to use the cmd promp.

My default in Vista64 was to make a restore point every day. Some may want that but I don't. I have mine set for once every 7 days and I've limited my folder size to about 4.8Gigs. That will give me 5 to 6 restore points which suits my needs.

My OS is on a 32Gig SSD so space is at a premium. My other HDD is 250Gigs and I've moved folders like pictures, movies, downloads, saved games, my documents and monst of my program files are installed on the second drive.

I try to keep the SSD with the OS as free of clutter as possible.

Both of my sons and myself had the same problem you've mentioned. A restore point a day is way too much given the size that Vista allocates for restore points.

 

Strange thing is that it was 30GB gone, but after disable and re-enable a few times, it said it was 14GB not 30. Not sure what's up with that. I may disable it entirely. I really don't want even 5GB consumed for something that I never really use.

 

A restore point might save you some day.

Check out Vista Manager. There is a lot of stuff in that program and it may fix any other problems you may have.

 

no clue why you would want vista manager for such simple things that you do once.. (but i still check it out. but i guess it will be too powerful for the ordinary user, and of no gain for the the advanced one, as a simple google search results in all of that).

 

Whoever mentioned Photoshop - Photoshop is good at cleaning up after you close it.
There may be some cached files - but I think that is set to about 1GB on default or maybe less.

Temp files generally are acouple of hundred Megabytes to maybe a few GB - its difficult to exceed 5-6GB in CS4 - I did reach 33-34GB once though.

But as I said - PS is good at cleaning up - and I know, my temp file is on D:

 

You can erase all restore points when you go into system restore. I did that and it cleared 30 gb of harddrive space. Vista creates a restore each time you add updates. So erase all past restore point and there you go!