Where'd my drive space go? Windows Vista.

[ChrisAttebery]

Is there is program that will give me a better picture of where my HD space is being used? I have a new PC and Vista is reporting that 175GB are used on my C: drive. I checked the properties on each folder in the C: drive and came up with ~100GB. Where the hell is that other 75GB coming from?

Sorry for the newbie questions, but I've been out of the PC game for a while. I've only had Vista for the last couple weeks. It seems to hide alot of stuff or ask you 10 times if you really want to do things.

Thanks,


Chris

 

[corkyg]

You may not be accounting for NTFS overhead. The MFT Reserved zone is minimally 12.5% of the drive's freespace. You also have the metadata files and MFT files. And, there may be shadow copies of things as part of system restore.

 

[vailr]

http://w3.win.tue.nl/nl/onderz...lization/sequoiaview//

 

[Fox5]

Try defragging, sometimes that will free up space. If you highlight some files/folders and go into their properties, you'll see two values, size on disk and size. Size is the actual file size, size on disk is how much it's taking up due to fragmentation or not being aligned among a 4KB block boundary.(NTFS allocates data in 4KB blocks, so small files waste a lot of space, and that's why databases were invented)

 

[Cogman]

I've never had a defrag free up space.
And no, databases where not invented because small files take up too much space, Databases where invented to efficiently and quickly retrieve data. Most databases take up SIGNIFICANTLY more space then the actual data does. Like, 1MB of data to 100MB of data

Shadow copies are the most likely culprit. I've seen some large amounts of data freed up by deleting them (BTW, I don't recommend it. The shadow copies have saved my butt so many times. It is an extremely nice feature to have)

 

[Falloutboy]

I've had a simlar problem with my current vista install. about a month ago if filled up, so I uninstalled some misc things I didn't use and freed up 10gb. which has turned to 0 again and I can't figure out where its going i'll free up 500mb and it will be gone in a few days.

 

[ChrisAttebery]

Thanks for the replies guys. This is a fairly new install, only about 3 weeks old. Shadow copies makes the most sense to me.

 

[Majic 7]

It's restore points. Vista allocates 15% of your disk space for it and shadow copies. My system was telling me I had 160 GBs of used space when I could only account for about 60 or 70. Go to Administrative Tools, then free up disk space, pick my files or all files, then it will give you a disk cleanup window. Choose the second tab and it has a clean up option under system restore. This will delete all restore points except your last one. Shadow Copies is only available above Home Premium, so if you have that delete them also if you are sure everything is working right.

 

[rgallant]

Information
By default System Restore is scheduled to create a restore point at 12 AM every day (Daily trigger) and at every system startup (At startup trigger) in Task Scheduler if any system changes were made from the last time it checked. This will show you how to change these schedule settings, or disable one or both triggers.


http://www.vistax64.com/tutori...re-point-schedule.html

to edit task