Rapidly shrinking C drive in Vista ?

mathias

OK , I have Vista installed now for about 2 weeks , got it just nice , I have very few programs installed , just itunes and fear I think , All Ive been doing on it is installing drivers and checking functionality , today I noticed the C: drive is now 80 GB free space. Its a 114GB drive and theres nothing on it but Vista , Yesterday it was 95GB free space , the day before it was 101GB free space.

When I go to the C drive , grab all the folders , including hidden ones , and right click and choose properties , it says 14GB of files ,

Does anyone know what is taking up my free space and why its shrinking so quickly for no apparent reason ?

NeoRox

Yes, its Vistas shadow copies.

Please be aware that this is vistas system restore. By turning it off you will not be able to restore your computer to an earlier date if you have a problem. It takes up to 15% of your disk space.


to disable it right click my computer>properties>system protecton>and untick the c drive.

Do so at your own risk.

mathias

Thanks for that , thought it might be something like that , i have the system backed up as a ghost using retrospect anyway so Im turning it off , its too massive a hog of hard drive space .

mathias

OK , went to "turn of " restore and it was never on , ouch , it says there are no backups made and there is still 15 - 20 GB of unaccounted for space !! :eek: ...And its growing , 2 more gigs gone since I posted this !

Also shadow copy is not in home premium , only in business and up , so whats happening to my drive , yikes !!

Anyone any ideas , has anyone else seen this , the drive reports as healthy in all tests , there doesnt seem to be anything wrong with it , just a lot of space being used for something I cant find !!

mathias

Humble apologies to all concerned , I was wrong, even though the system says that restore was turned off , it wasn't , seems it lies to you unless you log in as administrator ,

Here is a link explaining how to use command prompt to see how much shadow copy ( which is indeed in premium , apologies again , ) and restore are using ,

http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-reduce-disk-space-used-by-windows-vista-system-restore.html

And also in that link is a useful command to reduce the amount of space shadowcopy uses ,
Why would you need to ?Well just look at how much that hungry animal was using in my system , 17 GB , now thats too much , right ?
My install is only two weeks old and it seems to be backing up the whole install and then some , really it shouldn't need anything over and above user files etc. as all system files can be recovered from the Vista disc , surely ?

This would suck if you only had say , 60 or 80 GB on a laptop !!

astrofool

It's really going to depend on how much of your disk you use, alot of people barely need a 20GB drive, let alone 80/160/500GB, might as well put the unused drive space to use for those that don't know how, and those that do will know how to change the settings anyway

calex71

mathias wrote:

This would suck if you only had say , 60 or 80 GB on a laptop !!

Dont i know, i did a clean install on a laptop with an 80gb drive on saturday and check a few hours later after id installed all drivers an the bare minimum of apps (ill keep it like this , honest ;-) lol) laptop had an 80gb drive and partitions roughly 70 gb for c: and d: is 10gb as the recovery patition.

Checked later after watching a few videos and low and behold i only had 39.4gbs