Vista showing 70Gb used

Help,

I am running a Dell with 288Gb on the hard drive. Currently Vista is showing 70Gb used whereas I can only account for a max of 20Gb and most of that appears to be used by Windows itself. Anyone know why this might be?

I have reasonable experience with pc's and regularly clear out temps etc but cannot find this missing space.

Blaketon

Have you done any repairs or backups? This happened to me once before, I was browsing through some folders to see what was lingering around and I seen two folders labeled Backup1 and Backup2 from previous repairs or a reinstall I had done, can't remember which. These had taken up quit a bit of space. I just deleted them and all wa back to normal.

Hi,
Thanks for your reply. I am not aware of any backups being done although other people have access and Dell seem to do some sort of auto backup so I'll investigate.

Thanks again

Blaketon

Restore points also start to add up after some time...
I'd say the combination of these 2 makes that # just about right.
You can adjust how much drive space is allocated to system restore in that panel.

I believe the Vista default setting is 10% of drive space...so that would be 30G on yours.

Hi,
That makes sense I will certainly look into it.

Many thanks for replying

Blaketon

Thanks so much, by resetting Restore via disc clean up I have saved 40Gb of space. Clearly something to watch.

Blaketon

The Vista shadowstorage setting is 15% maximum. So unless you reduce the shadowstorage, the 15% of your C will be filled again (over time). If you paste this command into an elevated Command Prompt, it will reduce your shadowstorage :
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=300MB. Note that 300MB for MaxSize is the minimum allowed but I would suggest you set it to 10GB. That way you get at least some restore points. Also be aware that your current restore points will be purged when you resize.
If you want to check your current settings, use: vssadmin list shadowstorage.

Edit: I also recommend you use WinDirStat ( http://windirstat.info/ ) to show you what's on your disk. It will, however, not show the shadowstorage. For that you have to use the above command.

OK,

Thanks for that. I will do this when I am certain that everything is working ok.

Blaketon