Vista - What the heck keeps eating my hard drive?

Alright, this has annoyed me enough to ask... It seems when my computer is idle, the HDD light on it that represents disk activity flashes at least once a second, sometimes more, indicating to me that it's always, always doing something. That's fine. What gets me is I leave my computer on all the time now since it runs quieter than my old one, and I can't hear it through the earplugs I wear at night (it's in my room and I need dead quiet to get to sleep.) Now when I wake up, sometimes I'm missing anywhere from 2 to 5 gigs of hard drive space. What the **** is that? Not downloading anything for a week, I'm down 20 gigs of hard drive space. I installed CCleaner and removed the crap files, and it freed the data, but the fact remains I would rather not have my space go missing whether I am going to use it all or not. Now it seems that a Windows Defender update runs at 2 AM and a defragmentation runs at 4 AM, by checking the schedules, but what accounts for the missing HD space? What could write 2-5 gigs of crap overnight?

edit: And where the hell did my line breaks go? It looks like I didn't even press enter once. Great.

edit 2: My mistake, I do use CCleaner but the tool that I had been using prior was simply WIndows' disk cleanup utility. It seems to do the trick pretty well. I still wanna figure out what's causing this...

Hi Nemephosis,

It's your system restore points eating the space up. Use Disk Cleanup and erase all your SR points except the last one. You can always disable SR if you don't want it eating your space up but you can get it right back and if you do disable it, you won't have the option to use it if you need it. You can also modify the amount of space it takes as well.

Thank you, that worked perfectly. I turned it off and just freed another six gigs. I have a hard drive the size of Texas (for me anyway, it's 320 gigs, so 298 usable, minus everything I have installed.) I had a 40 gig HD for seven years and never filled it but the fact remains that I didn't care for the ever shrinking HD.

Shutting it off killed all the restore points and gave me all that space back. Thanks very much.

In addition to what Airbot said, System Restore is set to create a restore point at 12:00 AM by default, which you can see (and change if desired) in Task Scheduler,

System Restore Task - Change Automatic Restore Point Schedule

While in there and seeing as you leave your computer on 24/7, you might want to take the opportunity to disable the setting where it will create a restore point at startup.

If you want to change the amount of space allocated to SR,

System Restore - disk space

As far as disabling it goes that comes down to personal preference. Me I prefer to leave it on just because it makes it very easy to recover from a bad driver update among other things. I just run Disk Cleanup every now and then and clear out all but the latest one.

Don't leave System Restore off mate. I promise, one day you'll regret it. Take Airbots suggestion and modify the amount of space it uses. See Brink's Tutorials on how to do this.

Merry Christmas

Norm

Hello Nemephosis.

They're right; one day you may need it. Here's the tutorial.

System Restore - disk space















Later Ted

I only ever had to reinstall Windows 2000 on my old computer once in seven years. I'll take the chances. But thank you anyway, I really appreciate the help you've given me. This place is incredibly friendly.

Merry Christmas to everyone

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you too!


















Later Ted

Very seriously, you gotta re-enable system restore.

I have limited maximum space allotment to 2 GB and feel safe with limiting system restore to three (4, tops) restore points at a time. Now, space loss is negligible.

Very very very seriously...it is not very smart to disable system restore. Honest. Please restore your sytem restore

[OT]....@CNY I thought you were on sabbatical?......



















Later Ted