Windows vista disk fragmenter easting A LOT of disk space

[scottyjamison]

I am a relatively unexperienced windows vista user using windows home premium
at 32 bit on an acer aspire 6920 notebook. I noticed that occassionaly my
disk space would drop dramatically without me doing anything. 100s of mbs
would just disappear for no reason, so probably being stupid i decided to run
the disk fragmenter to try and fix the problem. BUT to my horror i was
shocked to find that the disk fragmenter began to eat up my hard disk space
big style. I went from 79.7GB to 72.5GB in just over an hour.

What the hell happened and can it be fixed? can i get my disk space back? i
thought the disk fragmenter was supposed to help your computer not rob it.

does anyone else have this problem and can someone please help me? im kinda
desparate, i cant believe it.

P.S if someone is kind enough to give me advice and you keep it simple so i
can understand and follow it.

 

[solon fox]

I am a relatively unexperienced windows vista user using windows home premium
at 32 bit on an acer aspire 6920 notebook.  I noticed that occassionalymy
disk space would drop dramatically without me doing anything.  100s of mbs
would just disappear for no reason, so probably being stupid i decided torun
the disk fragmenter to try and fix the problem.  BUT to my horror i was
shocked to find that the disk fragmenter began to eat up my hard disk space
big style.  I went from 79.7GB to 72.5GB in just over an hour.

What the hell happened and can it be fixed? can i get my disk space back? i
thought the disk fragmenter was supposed to help your computer not rob it..

does anyone else have this problem and can someone please help me? im kinda
desparate, i cant believe it.

P.S if someone is kind enough to give me advice and you keep it simple soi
can understand and follow it.

How big is your hard drive? Maybe defrag didn't have enough space to
work in?

Vista has several recovery features that eat disk space; shadow
copies, system recovery check points, updates and even indexing use up
space. Many people have commented on Vista growing and consuming hard
drive space. All of these features are designed to help you in a
recovery situation and basically protect you from losing data. I think
it is beneficial, even though it is alarming when you don't know what
is going on.

You can use 'Disk Cleanup' on your hard drive properties to help free
up space. If you are satisfied with the latest changes to your system
and comfortable with your system stability, then you can use the 'More
Options' tab in Disk Cleanup to remove all but the most recent system
restore point and shadow copies. This would free up quite a bit of
space.

Nonetheless, I think that a long term answer requires some
consideration of offline backups, a plan for archiving the unused but
important data you wish to keep, and as always, a larger primary hard
drive.

-solon fox

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

A good thing to try when the Windows defragger is not getting the job done
(timing out or not enough free space to work in) is to download a trial copy
of Diskeeper or Perfect Disk and use that. Both of those are excellent in
handling jobs where free space is minimal.

I am a relatively unexperienced windows vista user using windows home
premium
at 32 bit on an acer aspire 6920 notebook. I noticed that occassionaly my
disk space would drop dramatically without me doing anything. 100s of mbs
would just disappear for no reason, so probably being stupid i decided to
run
the disk fragmenter to try and fix the problem. BUT to my horror i was
shocked to find that the disk fragmenter began to eat up my hard disk
space
big style. I went from 79.7GB to 72.5GB in just over an hour.

What the hell happened and can it be fixed? can i get my disk space back?
i
thought the disk fragmenter was supposed to help your computer not rob it.

does anyone else have this problem and can someone please help me? im
kinda
desparate, i cant believe it.

P.S if someone is kind enough to give me advice and you keep it simple so
i
can understand and follow it.

How big is your hard drive? Maybe defrag didn't have enough space to
work in?

Vista has several recovery features that eat disk space; shadow
copies, system recovery check points, updates and even indexing use up
space. Many people have commented on Vista growing and consuming hard
drive space. All of these features are designed to help you in a
recovery situation and basically protect you from losing data. I think
it is beneficial, even though it is alarming when you don't know what
is going on.

You can use 'Disk Cleanup' on your hard drive properties to help free
up space. If you are satisfied with the latest changes to your system
and comfortable with your system stability, then you can use the 'More
Options' tab in Disk Cleanup to remove all but the most recent system
restore point and shadow copies. This would free up quite a bit of
space.

Nonetheless, I think that a long term answer requires some
consideration of offline backups, a plan for archiving the unused but
important data you wish to keep, and as always, a larger primary hard
drive.

-solon fox

 

[Steve Thackery]

I'm inclined to think this is a coincidence. I don't think there is any way
defragging your disk can result in a loss of disk space (not permanent,
anyway).

As the other contributors have said, Vista runs other activities which
consume disk space. I would take their advice re backups, Disk Cleanup,
etc.

Two last things to say about defragging. Firstly, manually defragging is
not a sensible response to seeing your disk space go down. Defragging is
not intended to release disk space, nor consume it. It simply reorganises
the data on the disk to make it faster to access. (In reality defragging
can release some space, but only a bit, and that isn't its real purpose).

Secondly, you should never need to defrag manually anyway. Vista kicks off
a defrag once a week automatically, and all the informed opinion is that it
works fine if you leave it to its own devices).

I would look elsewhere for what is using up your disk space. It is almost
certainly Vista doing its normal business, though, and I honestly think you
could safely ignore it.

SteveT

 

[scottyjamison]

Thanks you the help but i have just one more question. Is it common to lose
about 7GB of disk storage in little over 2 hours, and if i deleted previous
restore points to clear up disk space would my computer be OK?

Thanks

 

[scottyjamison]

Ok, i would like to remove my previous restore points to free up disk space
but how do you find out how many restore points you currently have? i would
like to find this out before i decided to delete them or not just in case.

thanks

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Type "system restore" in Start/Search and hit Enter. Click Next in the
window that appears. You will see a list of recent restore points. Put a
check in the Show Restore Points Older Than 5 Days box and you will see the
complete list. How many restore points are being stored depends on how much
storage space is allocated for them and how big each restore point file is.
On my system I see five going back about a week because the restore point
files are fairly large and it only takes five to fill the allocated storage
for them. YMMV.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

No and No. If you are just doing emails and surfing the net then the temp
files involved would not show a noticeable change in free space on your
drive. If you are doing a lot of content creation then you might use that
much space in a couple of hours. In any case, you would not be creating
system restore points. Those are created when you install new software.
The system will create one new one after a day or so, but that has nothing
to do with ordinary usage. You system will not be OK simply as the result
of deleting restore points. In fact you will lose the ability to solve some
kinds of problems by being able to go back to a time before the problem
occurred.

 

[ray]

I am a relatively unexperienced windows vista user using windows home
premium at 32 bit on an acer aspire 6920 notebook. I noticed that
occassionaly my disk space would drop dramatically without me doing
anything. 100s of mbs would just disappear for no reason, so probably
being stupid i decided to run the disk fragmenter to try and fix the
problem. BUT to my horror i was shocked to find that the disk
fragmenter began to eat up my hard disk space big style. I went from
79.7GB to 72.5GB in just over an hour.

What the hell happened and can it be fixed? can i get my disk space
back? i thought the disk fragmenter was supposed to help your computer
not rob it.

does anyone else have this problem and can someone please help me? im
kinda desparate, i cant believe it.

P.S if someone is kind enough to give me advice and you keep it simple
so i can understand and follow it.

I wonder where you found the "disk fragmenter" - most folks use a disk
defragmenter - though I'm not sure why - this IS the 21st century and a
properly designed filesystem should not need it.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

What can happen is that the amount of free space can be erroneously reported
after a lot of deletions and defragging can force the system to re-enumerate
the free space. I have seen that strange effect a couple of time under both
XP and Vista. It isn't common but emptying the recycle bin and then running
a defragger can resolve such an issue.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Shoulda, woulda, coulda is all very nice but fragmentation is still a fact
of life.

 

[ray]

Shoulda, woulda, coulda is all very nice but fragmentation is still a
fact of life.

Except, apparently, for *nix systems. Been using them since 1992 - never
had a fragmentation problem.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Even OS/X runs a "cleanup" following an installation that is really a
defrag.

 

[scottyjamison]

So no one has an idea why, when i used disk defragmentation on vista, it used
up 7GB of hard drive space? i know it is not supposed to but i wasn't doing
anything else on my laptop so it has to be the defragmentation. When i
stopped the disk defragmentation process my hard drive size ceased to
decrease further, it stopped when defragmentation stopped.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

Defragmentation does not use disk space like that. It just doesn't work
that way. It uses disk space but it moves files not creates them.

 

[Steve Thackery]

Defragmentation does not use disk space like that. It just doesn't work

that way. It uses disk space but it moves files not creates them.

That's exactly what I said. Due respect to scottyjamison, but there's
something else going on here. It's nothing at all to do with defragging.

SteveT

 

[Nonny]

So no one has an idea why, when i used disk defragmentation on vista, it used
up 7GB of hard drive space? i know it is not supposed to but i wasn't doing
anything else on my laptop so it has to be the defragmentation. When i
stopped the disk defragmentation process my hard drive size ceased to
decrease further, it stopped when defragmentation stopped.

You must have missed what Colin wrote to someone else earlier today:

"What can happen is that the amount of free space can be
erroneously reported after a lot of deletions and defragging can
force the system to re-enumerate the free space. I have seen
that strange effect a couple of time under both XP and Vista.
It isn't common but emptying the recycle bin and then running a
defragger can resolve such an issue."

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

I don't know if what he does on his computer triggers an automatic defrag
(some third party defragger kicking in perhaps) and he associates that with
the file space issue by coincidence but I agree with you that something else
is going on.