Where has all my disk space gone?

[Qu0ll]

On my D: drive, Vista reports that 54GB have been used but when I add up the
totals for each folder it only comes to 18GB. Where is the rest of the
space? I have turned on display of hidden files and even display of hidden
OS files but nothing is showing up.

All I can think of is restore points but would they take up that much space
for just a handful of points?

How can I determine how much space is being used by restore points?

--
And loving it,

-Q
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[Kevin John Panzke]

On my D: drive, Vista reports that 54GB have been used but when I add up
the totals for each folder it only comes to 18GB. Where is the rest of
the space? I have turned on display of hidden files and even display of
hidden OS files but nothing is showing up.

All I can think of is restore points but would they take up that much
space for just a handful of points?

How can I determine how much space is being used by restore points?

Sub Folder's Are Using Up The Rest Of The Space, Just FYI>

 

[Andrew McLaren]

G'day cobber

What tool are you using to measure disk space?

I ask, because many pre-Vista file and disk utilities do not understand how
to use junction points. They will over-estimate how much disk space is used.
If you compare results from Explorer with a tool like, say SpaceMonger
(http://www.sixty-five.cc/sm), SpaceMonger gets it totally wrong. Actually
SpaceMonger is an excellent utility - it just needs to be updated, to
understand Vista's file systems conventions.

You can also get some idea of disk usage by running the "Disk Clean up" tool
under Accessories, System Tools. This will show you how much space is used
by hidden temp files, etc. The tool won't actual delete the files until you
click on OK, just hit Cancel to back out.

Hope it helps a bit,
Andrew

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Qu0ll

You need to use a command line to see this information, but first, you
should perform a cleanup on that drive. Go to Start and type disk and
in the results, click the Disk Cleanup program. Select Files from all users
on this computer and then select the D: drive. Click the More Options Tab
and then, in the System Restore and Shadow Copies section, click the Cleanup
Button. This will delete all but the most recent system restore files.

Next, if your maximum size for System Restore is way too large, you should
adjust this. By default Vista sets the maximum size allocated for VSS to 15%
of the disk size. With some of newer drives, this can result in a huge
amount of space being allocated.

Go to Start and type cmd and in the results, right click the cmd.exe
item and
select the "Run as administrator" option. OK the UAC prompt.

When the command window opens, type the following.

D:

Press ENTER

This will switch to the D: drive.

Now type the following command.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Press ENTER.

The result will show the current amount of Used, Allocated, and Maximum
allowed size for the Volume Shadow Storage on that drive.

The following
command will set the maximum amount of disk space used for the shadow
storage to 10GB.

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=D: /On=D: /MaxSize=10.0GB

Press ENTER.

(type the command as shown, including the spaces)
You should see a message that the command succeeded.

You can change the final (MAXSIZE=) value in the command to suit yourself.
(ie:
change 10.0GB to 5.0GB)

 

[Qu0ll]

G'day cobber

G'day. For all the non-Aussies out there, "cobber" is a mate in our
vernacular.

What tool are you using to measure disk space?

I am looking at the Used Space in Explorer. Also, when I use Acronis True
Image to create an image it is 36GB in size (it is compressed). However,
when I run JDiskReport it reports a total usage of only 18GB which
correlates with my calculation by totalling the space used in each folder.

You can also get some idea of disk usage by running the "Disk Clean up"
tool under Accessories, System Tools. This will show you how much space is
used by hidden temp files, etc. The tool won't actual delete the files
until you > click on OK, just hit Cancel to back out.

When I run Disk Cleanup it says that the total amount of disk space I would
gain is... 0 bytes. So there doesn't appear to be any wastage happening.

Any further ideas?

--
And loving it,

-Q
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
(Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me)

 

[Qu0ll]

Qu0ll

You need to use a command line to see this information, but first, you
should perform a cleanup on that drive. Go to Start and type disk and
in the results, click the Disk Cleanup program. Select Files from all
users > on this computer and then select the D: drive. Click the More
Options Tab and then, in the System Restore and Shadow Copies section,
click the Cleanup Button. This will delete all but the most recent system
restore files.

Next, if your maximum size for System Restore is way too large, you should
adjust this. By default Vista sets the maximum size allocated for VSS to
15% of the disk size. With some of newer drives, this can result in a huge
amount of space being allocated.

Go to Start and type cmd and in the results, right click the cmd.exe
item and
select the "Run as administrator" option. OK the UAC prompt.

When the command window opens, type the following.

D:

Press ENTER

This will switch to the D: drive.

Now type the following command.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Press ENTER.

The result will show the current amount of Used, Allocated, and Maximum
allowed size for the Volume Shadow Storage on that drive.

The following
command will set the maximum amount of disk space used for the shadow
storage to 10GB.

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=D: /On=D: /MaxSize=10.0GB

Press ENTER.

(type the command as shown, including the spaces)
You should see a message that the command succeeded.

You can change the final (MAXSIZE=) value in the command to suit yourself.
(ie:
change 10.0GB to 5.0GB)

A-ha, I think you're on to something. When I query the shadow storage it
reveals:

D:\>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (D\\?\Volume{7592a6db-bf97-11db-b972-806e6f6e6963}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume:
(D\\?\Volume{7592a6db-bf97-11db-b972806e6f6e6963}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 32.111 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 33.905 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 41.892 GB

so that's where all the space has gone. To resolve this I am simply going
to turn off System Restore on this drive as I already use Acronis True Image
anyway.

Thanks very much.

--
And loving it,

-Q
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
(Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me)

 

[Steve]

I'm having the same problem on a new Vista machine. Drive C shows 213G
free, but only 112G available shrink space. Max ShadowCopy is 33G, not
sure how I'm losing 100G of space.

Ran across this, looks like there's no solution?

http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-10877_11-6170510.html

Chances are you’ll discover that the size of available shrink space
can be much less than you would see if you were to look at the amount
of free space displayed in Computer. The reason for this discrepancy
is that the size of the available space can be restricted by the
amount of space currently allocated to and the location of page,
restore, shadow copy, and hibernation files. The location of the files
plays a big part - these files are marked as unmovable and the Disk
Management console tool is unable to relocate them.

If these unmovable files are located in the middle of the free space
on the disk, only the amount of free space on the other side of the
files will actually be available to the new partition.

The Disk Management Help file briefly mentions that you may be able to
work around this scenario by moving the page file to another to
another disk and deleting the show copies. However, after disabling
the page file, disabling hibernation, disabling the System Restore,
using Disk Cleanup to delete System Restore and Shadow Copy files, and
defragging the hard disk, I was still unable to get more available
space for the second partition.

 

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

Brink

That does make it easier to understand. BTW, you've put together some very
good tutorials on that website.

 

[Qu0ll]

That does make it easier to understand. BTW, you've put together some very
good tutorials on that website.

I agree with Ronnie - it's one of the better Vista sites.

--
And loving it,

-Q
_________________________________________________
(e-mail address removed)
(Replace the "SixFour" with numbers to email me)