Hard Drive being gobbled

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vista is installed on a laptop with 2 partitions - one is forrecovery only
and is not used.
The other is c drive and is 143Gb.
Free space on C seems to be diminshing by about 1 to 3 Gb each week.
i've searched for new files etc that might be the problem but haven't seen
any files that seem unusual.
Any clues as to what might cause this, or where to look/
 
barglen said:
vista is installed on a laptop with 2 partitions - one is forrecovery only
and is not used.
The other is c drive and is 143Gb.
Free space on C seems to be diminshing by about 1 to 3 Gb each week.
i've searched for new files etc that might be the problem but haven't seen
any files that seem unusual.
Any clues as to what might cause this, or where to look/
Click to expand...

Do you have system restore enabled ?
It can use by default up to 15% of your hard drive space.
 
A good thought. Thanks.
I speculated that it could be something like that and that it will stabilise
in due course. So far I have 37Gb used of the 143Gb. But about another 1 to
3 Gb is being taken up each week.
15% of 143 would be about 21Gb so I suppose it could be Vista gradually
building up to that. Its still a relatively new system (about 2 months old).
Not confident though.
Hence wondered if anyone else has a similar experience with Vista.
 
barglen said:
A good thought. Thanks.
I speculated that it could be something like that and that it will
stabilise
in due course. So far I have 37Gb used of the 143Gb. But about another 1
to
3 Gb is being taken up each week.
15% of 143 would be about 21Gb so I suppose it could be Vista gradually
building up to that. Its still a relatively new system (about 2 months
old).
Not confident though.
Hence wondered if anyone else has a similar experience with Vista.
Click to expand...


Google for vssadmin, it will tell you how to, if you want, limit the size
taken by restore. A mate of mine had a 120Gig HDD and after a couple of
weeks restore had used over 20 Gig, so he limited it to 10 Gig and all has
been well.

Me, I have never needed to use Restore, and have it set to not use more than
5 Gig, that is enough space for a good few restore points.
 
Barglen

The first thing I do after installing Vista and getting al of my software
installed is a bit of maintenance. I feel that the default 15% of a 500GB
hard drive (75GB) is a bit too much to reserve for restore points and other
backups. Testing has shown that on a 500GB drive, 10GB is plenty of space to
allocate for the built-in backups.

The following procedure is safe and can be used to restrict the amount of
disk space that is used.

First, free up all of your disk space by deleting all but the most current
restore point. Go to Start/All Programs/Accessories/Disk Cleanup and you
will see the option there.

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 in the results, right click the cmd item and
select the "Run as administrator" option. OK the UAC prompt.

When the command window opens, type the following.

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

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /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)

This command assumes that your system drive is C:
 
Thank you.
As soon as I used the disk cleanup on the restore points it recovered 18Gb.
Have since set the max to be 8Gb.
Great help, thank you.
 
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