Where are all m y GB's gone? Loosing HD Space

[Peter]

I have a Lenovo R61 laptop for about 4 weeks now
and running Vista office on it. A few days ago I
suddeny saw my available HD space dropping below
10GB of a total of 110GB.
Not knowing of what might have happend, I installed
and started a tiny little programm (TreeSize) to
figure out where was eating all the space.

To my very surprise, the bill is as follows:

Used in all folders 40.7 GB,
Available HD Space: 25.9GB out of 110GB

IMHO, my caculation is as follows:

110GB minus 40GB equals 70GB (free space),
Vista reports 25 GB free, so I am missing
roughly 50GB, more than reported as beeing
allocated.

Who is using all this disk-space??

Any help would very much appreciated.

Peter

 

[Spirit]

Some is the difference between raw capacity and formatted capacity. The rest
is in a restore
partition, usually 15% or more... for Lenovo its a lot more....

 

[Andre Da Costa[ActiveWin]]

And System Restore Images the operating system might be using.

 

[Peter]

Some is the difference between raw capacity and formatted capacity. The rest
is in a restore
partition, usually 15% or more... for Lenovo its a lot more....

No, this would have been too easy I am talking about the
Vista partition only! There is of corse an extra restore partion
but that has not been accounted here.
Peter

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

The system restore partition set by Lenovo is not the same as the system
restore data produced by Vista which it will store on C.

Use Disk Cleanup to get space back. When the DC selection window appears,
click on more options and then click on 'Clean Up' in the 'System Resore and
Shadow copies' section.

 

[Peter]

The system restore partition set by Lenovo is not the same as the system
restore data produced by Vista which it will store on C.

No doubt

Use Disk Cleanup to get space back. When the DC selection window
appears, click on more options and then click on 'Clean Up' in the
'System Resore and Shadow copies' section.

What I did: I opened Disk Cleanup, selected advanced options and
clicked the button to remove all but the last shadow copy. I think
it did the trick. I am quite sure that I did that before.

What I hate about Vista is its secretiveness.
- Why is'nt there any indication about how many space is used for shadow
copies?
- Where can I control how may space should be used at maximum, if any

etc. etc.

Anyhow, I got the space back.

Peter

 

[Annie R J Brion]

No doubt


What I did: I opened Disk Cleanup, selected advanced options and
clicked the button to remove all but the last shadow copy. I think it
did the trick. I am quite sure that I did that before.

What I hate about Vista is its secretiveness. - Why is'nt there any
indication about how many space is used for shadow copies? - Where
can I control how may space should be used at maximum, if any

etc. etc.

Anyhow, I got the space back.

I switch off System Restore on my PCs and Use Acronis TrueImage to
schedule "System State" backups to my D: drive. As it can do incremental
backups of system state, the initial backup is 3GB with the subsequent
ones coming in at 23MB-45MB. Vista's System Restore takes about 3GB each
snapshot on my desktop.

I now have full control of my system recovery data with no large hidden
chunks of data

 

[Michael Walraven]

See Windows Help and support for
'system restore'
line 10 on my result is 'how much disk space does system restore require'
(short answer - up to 15% of disk)

Michael
Vista Home premium

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

And you really needed that space, even with another 100gb free?

System Restore isn't there just to use up space, and when you come to use
it, you won't care how much space it takes up as long as your system is
brought back from unconscious..

 

[Peter]

And you really needed that space, even with another 100gb free?

No Idea what You mean here

System Restore isn't there just to use up space, and when you come to
use it, you won't care how much space it takes up as long as your system
is brought back from unconscious..

I do understand that we would need backup, but look what has been used
by Vista! After I removed all but the last backup, I recovered more
than 50GB!! Space currently 'in use' on the Vista Partion is about
40GB!! Available space was roughly 25GB.
So Backup took about double the size of the operational data, this does
does not really look to me as an reasonable amount of backup space,
especially if you get not told about that fact!
I do use my own central backup system (BackupPc) but I am not sure
whether any backup system would provide the required services.

Still looking for some kind information of how I could manage my HD
space myself insteadt of believing completely in Vista's voodo magic.

Thanks, Peter

 

[Peter]

Another reason for losing disk space. Does your laptop have offline
folders turnd on? Are you able to access any map drives when away from
the office. I had a client that had the company map drive set to
offline folder. It was 70 gigs in size.

Cool.... no I don't

 

[HeyBub]

Still looking for some kind information of how I could manage my HD
space myself insteadt of believing completely in Vista's voodo magic.

Thanks, Peter

You can't. Vista is trying to relieve you of tedious tasks. What with
temporary files, system restore points, dynamic paging file, and magic, it's
simply not realistic to account for the bytes. If Vista needs more space, it
will adjust its footprint.

Don't worry about it. There's no way to control it anyway.

 

[Mike Hall - MVP]

In many cases, Vista recovers where XP would blue screen. The 'backups' made
by Vista facilitate this.