Magically gained around 136 GB over a day

Free1234

New Member
Hi there,

I am a little concerned.

I have a small HD, only 320 GB and I usually run hard up against the limit - anything between 4-14 GB free - until yesterday.

As I turned on my computer, I found that I didn't have 4 GB, I had 140 GB, which made me wonder if something big had been deleted by a new AVG virus scan or something. I really don't know.

After doing some searching, I found that sometimes this has to do with shadow copies. I found that my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage Space was something like 139 GB, although I have since then lowered it to 30 GB. The Used Shadow Copy Space is 3 GB and the Allocated is around 5 GB.

Did my computer just decide to delete shadow copies because it went over the 139 GB limit or should I be considering another possibility? Should I run a system restore? From what I can see, I don't think my files have been affected by the change in HD space and the number of 139 GB is quite a convenient number. The Shadow Copy limit might also explain why I always had such a low amount of memory and I couldn't explain why.

Anyway, any thoughts on why I have gained all of this memory?

Thanks
 

My Computer

System One

  • Memory
    320 GB
Windows deletes shadow copies periodically to make room for temporary files created during normal operations as they do occupy a major portion of any disk.
It also is wise to keep a liberal amount of free space if that's the only drive you have to give it "elbow room".
Even on a system with lots of space such as mine, very occasionally I've seen a popup that there's not enough room to create temporary files when installing major software, for instance.
I recommend you do an Extended Disk Cleanup every now and again, see the tute here: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/158356-extended-disk-cleanup.html
 

My Computer

System One

  • Operating System
    Win 10 Pro x64 x 2
    Manufacturer/Model
    Alienware ALX x58
    CPU
    Intel® Core™ i7-975 Extreme O/C to 4.02 GHz, 8MB Cache
    Motherboard
    Asus® P6T Deluxe V2 X58 LGA1366
    Memory
    24GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 SDRAM at 1600MHz - 6 x 4096MB
    Graphics Card(s)
    1792 MB NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 295 Dual Core
    Sound Card
    Onboard Soundmax® High-Definition 7.1 Performance Audio
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Samsung XL2370 HD LED backlit 23" W/S 2ms response time
    Screen Resolution
    1920 x 1080
    Hard Drives
    2 x 500gb SATA II
    1 x 1TB SATA II
    1 external eSATA LaCie 3TB
    (Non-RAID)
    PSU
    Alienware® 1200 Watt Multi-GPU
    Case
    Unique
    Cooling
    4 case fans @ CPU water cooling.
    Internet Speed
    1gb/s up and down
Windows deletes shadow copies periodically to make room for temporary files created during normal operations as they do occupy a major portion of any disk.
It also is wise to keep a liberal amount of free space if that's the only drive you have to give it "elbow room".
Even on a system with lots of space such as mine, very occasionally I've seen a popup that there's not enough room to create temporary files when installing major software, for instance.
I recommend you do an Extended Disk Cleanup every now and again, see the tute here: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/158356-extended-disk-cleanup.html


But I suppose you believe that what happened with my system is that 130GB or so of shadow copies were deleted, given the extra space I now have and my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage?

Thanks
 

My Computer

System One

  • Memory
    320 GB
But I suppose you believe that what happened with my system is that 130GB or so of shadow copies were deleted, given the extra space I now have and my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage?

Thanks

All we can do after the fact is speculate. If you have posted this before hand we could have helped you investigate and find the cause of the consumption but not now.
 

My Computers

System One System Two

  • Operating System
    Windows 8.1 Industry Pro x64
    Manufacturer/Model
    HP Pavillion Elite HPE-250f
    CPU
    Intel i7 860 Quad core 2.8 ghz
    Memory
    8 gb
    Graphics Card(s)
    ATI Radeon HD 5770 1 gb ram
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Alienware 25 AW2521HF
    Screen Resolution
    1920x1080 &1680x1050
    Hard Drives
    1 TB x2
    Other Info
    https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-pavilion-elite-hpe-250f/
  • Operating System
    Windows 2012 R2 Data center/Linux Mint
    Manufacturer/Model
    Dell Poweredge T140
    CPU
    i3 9100 3.6GHz, 8M cache, 4C/4T
    Memory
    8GB 2666MT/s DDR4 ECC UDIMM
    Screen Resolution
    1680x1050
    Hard Drives
    1 TB & 360 GB x2
    Other Info
    https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/productdetailstxn/poweredge-t140?~ck=bt
All we can do after the fact is speculate. If you have posted this before hand we could have helped you investigate and find the cause of the consumption but not now.

So what do you think could have caused my system to return so much memory and is there a way to check if anything large was deleted recently?
 

My Computer

System One

  • Memory
    320 GB
ex_brit's comment on the shadow copy sounds reasonable however I personally have never used it. As I started before all we can do is speculate. You can view and attempt to recover deleted files using rescuva however if nothing appears to be missing and everything works then you really don't have anything to worry about. If you previously reduced shadow copy than perhaps windows is only now implementing the changes. https://www.piriform.com/recuva
 

My Computers

System One System Two

  • Operating System
    Windows 8.1 Industry Pro x64
    Manufacturer/Model
    HP Pavillion Elite HPE-250f
    CPU
    Intel i7 860 Quad core 2.8 ghz
    Memory
    8 gb
    Graphics Card(s)
    ATI Radeon HD 5770 1 gb ram
    Monitor(s) Displays
    Alienware 25 AW2521HF
    Screen Resolution
    1920x1080 &1680x1050
    Hard Drives
    1 TB x2
    Other Info
    https://www.cnet.com/products/hp-pavilion-elite-hpe-250f/
  • Operating System
    Windows 2012 R2 Data center/Linux Mint
    Manufacturer/Model
    Dell Poweredge T140
    CPU
    i3 9100 3.6GHz, 8M cache, 4C/4T
    Memory
    8GB 2666MT/s DDR4 ECC UDIMM
    Screen Resolution
    1680x1050
    Hard Drives
    1 TB & 360 GB x2
    Other Info
    https://www.dell.com/en-us/work/shop/productdetailstxn/poweredge-t140?~ck=bt
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