Boot time defrag recovers 11gb?

[SwampYankee]

Hi,
I've noticed that my disk space had been 'leaking'. I had 60gb free last
month and hade been down to 54 earlier in the week. I tried all sorts of
clean up methods but never really got back much. So, I did a boot time
defrag with a 3rd party product and all of a sudden I have 65 gb free. No
complaints but what happened here?

 

[Richard Urban]

Something entirely unrelated happened. Defragging does not free up disk
space. It will give you a larger chunk of "contiguous" free space, but not a
megabyte more than what you had to begin with.

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[SwampYankee]

Something entirely unrelated happened. Defragging does not free up disk
space. It will give you a larger chunk of "contiguous" free space, but not a
megabyte more than what you had to begin with.

I know and I agree with you. This should not have happened. Nonetheless
this was not a coincidence. The most unusual thing that preceded this
was the removal of photoshop cs2 and office 2003 last week in an attempt
to reclaim diskspance. I got back less than 1/2 GB and expected alot
more. Sitll I didn't see any evidence of the programs on my hard drive.
Lets wait this out, I bet this happens again next moth.

 

[John Barnes]

One thing you forgot to consider, Richard, is that some of the defrags
delete the shadow copies and restore points. Ya think?

 

[Richard Urban]

John,

You are sooo right. I feel silly because I was in communication with
PerfectDisk about just that happening at the beginning of the year.

Can it be starting already - at 63 years yrs.?

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[SwampYankee]

One thing you forgot to consider, Richard, is that some of the defrags
delete the shadow copies and restore points. Ya think?

I have system restore turned off. I need the disk space and I am
religious about backups.

 

[John Barnes]

Doubt it, too many great posts. Hope the poster doesn't need those missing
restore points. He could always just turn the process off and not loose the
space to begin with.

 

[Richard Urban]

Then, my friend, you have another condition on which I am drawing a blank.
(-:

--


Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

 

[John Barnes]

If it has been a couple of days, go into program files, right click on any
folder and select previous versions. Anything there? If not, then I would
certainly be checking to see what is being deleted. Richard is correct that
a defrag should NOT delete anything, only move file fragments around.

 

[SwampYankee]

Then, my friend, you have another condition on which I am drawing a blank.
(-:

I said I had system restore turned off, I didn't say it was never on.
Apparently PerfectDisk, you guessed correctly, cleaned up the old system
restore stuff. Thanks for you help though.
BTW, 63? You are way to old to be here, turn in your mouse and get back
on the command line where you belong
Best regards

 

[Paul Randall]

Hi, Richard
Do you know of a scripting way to display free space and used space that
includes space used by anything and everything, hidden or not, including
shadow copies and restore points?

-Paul Randall