ming

Hey all,

Haven't been on for a while now.... just noticed something strange on my pc. The last 2.9GB of free disk space of my e: drive has vanished into thin air. I first noticed this morning when I only had 5mb left on the drive but now it's down to 2mb. I have no idea where it's gone since I've not added any files to the drive at all.

Any ideas why the free space has shrunk? This is only a backup drive.. not an OS drive.

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Snowknight26

Either logs in the Windows folder, restore points, bigger page file, or temporary internet files (there are probably more, but I can't think of any at the moment).

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drz01

Windows has a strange habbit of putting update files on d drives or even e drives if you just installed a bunch of updates look for a folder called msdownld.tmp. You will have to set your options to view hidden folders/files...

perris

do an advanced search for files created from the time you know you had over two gigs...start with searching for files over a gig but just the date will do fine if that doesn't turn up anything

then see which of those you didn't put on the disc and there's your answer

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ming

Checked for system files, but none there. Disabled backup of non-OS drives. Done the advanced search... came back with nothing significant.

I'm just going to delete a few files and monitor it for a week or two.

Feeling paranoid this week coz Windows keeps seeking for something on one of the drives... sounds like as if it's trying to defrag or something even though it's not set to automatically defrag.

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fitz

is this vista?

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ming

ya.

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fitz

two things then for the two issues you mentioned

Disk space:
Vista, be default, starts creating system restore points that can chew up disk space pretty quickly.

From a command prompt, type and it should show you how much space it is taking up.
You can change the size used by system restore by using the command: 'vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=<drive>: /on=<drive>: /maxsize=<size>'
for example, to set the size to 1GB max on the D: drive and store the restore points on the D: drive: For your second point on constant disk usage, this is by design in Vista. There are a couple "features" in Vista that will always hit the disk. First is Superfetch, and second is the indexing/desktop search in Vista. Superfetch is basically a preloader/cache mechanism that loads programs/code that is used often into memory or code it thinks will be used soon into memory.. so, it reads the disk constantly and writes data into memory for use later. This is not a bad thing, and, when done well (see linux) can be quite effective.

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Akash

What about showing all hidden files including system and then checking if anything is there taking up all the space?

Can't say I've noticed it myself but I know when you install a SP for instance, it creates a temp folder that does not always get deleted - Had this with Office 07.