Hard drive space consumption

Ok, I have a new Dell Studio XPS desktop that is running vista 64 bit. Love the machine...it works great. However, the hard drive loses free space on a daily basis. I've been working with computers for about 14 years and this is the first time I have had anything like this happen. Last night is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. I was going through my library of music files deleting duplicates(to open up space). When I went to bed I had about 45 GB of space open on my HD. This morning/afternoon when I got back on the computer, I only have 35 GB of space available. I'm not d/l anything, the only thing that was going on was that Itunes was running, playing music from a playlist.

There was one new system restore point from sometime last night, but that only accounts for 1.5 GB at most.

I have really only used WinXP since about 2001. I did have a new computer last year with vista, but hated the performance and switched it to XP.

Any ideas on how I lost almost 10 GB of space overnight? Is it a vista issue? A system restore issue(currently set to automatic)?

Any help would be appreciated.

it may be a system restore issue , use diskcleanup to clean all but the most recent restore point (more options tab) then use this tutorial to manually set how much space vista sets aside for system restore in the future Change the amount of space used by System Restore | Windows Vista for Beginners

archie123, thank you for your response. After posting my message I did a little more research and found the answer you posted, in a previous message, it helped me understand the system restore issue a bit better. I have played around a bit with it prior to today as well, but the programming is a little lacking. I would like to have the option to only have say the past 3 restore points, but I have not been successful in anything other than removing all restore points except the last one.

After running disckcleanup and tuneup utilities 2009, which I have been running regularly to keep HD consumption down, I was able to free up about 2.5 GB of space. That still doesn't account for the other 7.5 GB of space I lost last night. There was a single update that took place last night, but it was just a definitions update for windows defender. I can't see where that would take up 7.5 GB of space.


Anyone else have any ideas how I could lose that much space overnight?

I will be changing the settings for system restore, ala the shadowspace setting in the command prompt and I have also made some changes in my windows update configuration. I'll be keeping my eyes on how this works out. Consumption has been at least a couple gigs a day, hopefully these changes will curtail that amount. But please, if you have any other ideas leave a message. Thanks.

Use this tool WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics
to diagnose losing free space

Thanks Flavius, That program is a neat tool to have. It will help in my monitoring.

I have resized my shadowstorage. After resizing my shadow storage it reset the amounts that were currently being used. I now have 47 GB available. I have recovered the amount that was lost. I will keep monitoring this until I am satisfied the changes I have made are all working.

Hi:
I just bought a Vista home premium 64-bit lenovo laptop.

I noticed that the 180 gb hard drive was showing nearly half full out-of-the-box....! So I used WinDirStat Portable and based on the normal computer files, it shows about 25gb of "stuff" which seems relatively reasonable for windows and their bloatware.

however, I clicked on Options - Show Unknown, and there's this HUGE block of 53.1gb of something that's eating up about a third of the drive.

What is this? And how do I fix it? It's showing the Unknown is at the root of C:\
Attached to this post is a screenshot of the windirstat analysis. You can see the huge block of "unknown" at the visual display near the bottom, and in the tree breakdown near the top.

What is all that...and how do I get rid of it or what setting do I need to change to prevent massive drive space loss?

thanks
tom

turkishgold said:

Hi:
I just bought a Vista home premium 64-bit lenovo laptop.

I noticed that the 180 gb hard drive was showing nearly half full out-of-the-box....! So I used WinDirStat Portable and based on the normal computer files, it shows about 25gb of "stuff" which seems relatively reasonable for windows and their bloatware.

however, I clicked on Options - Show Unknown, and there's this HUGE block of 53.1gb of something that's eating up about a third of the drive.

What is this? And how do I fix it? It's showing the Unknown is at the root of C:\
Attached to this post is a screenshot of the windirstat analysis. You can see the huge block of "unknown" at the visual display near the bottom, and in the tree breakdown near the top.

What is all that...and how do I get rid of it or what setting do I need to change to prevent massive drive space loss?

thanks
tom

Click to expand...

I think your shadow storage is set at 30% of your HD, normally it is allowed 15% of your HD space. This is only a guess, have a look at this tutorial and see how much is allocated.
http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/76227-system-restore-disk-space.html

got it...that worked. yeah the max size was set to Unbounded (!). Shrunk it to 10gb. Got ma' space back!

Is there a recommended max size for system restores? i'm fine with having one good one available.

Is there a standard size for system restores?

thanks!!
Tom

Glad to hear that you sorted it out, if you allocate more space you get more restore points and 3GB to 5GB max.size is more than enough.