What's Wrong with my Maths Here

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alasta

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#16924 4-Nov-2007 20:22

A couple of months ago I splashed out on a new Dell Inspiron 1520 with Windows Vista which has so far proven to be a good machine, but there is one thing that is troubling me.

Windows is telling me that my main hard drive partition is 100Gb in size, with 55Gb free and 45Gb used. I have determined the amount of space occupied by each of the folders in the root of that partition by right-clicking on each folder and selecting 'properties', but the space occupied by all of these folders seems to total only about 26Gb. So, if there is 55Gb of available space on the drive and 26Gb of space occupied, where has the other 19Gb gone?

I've set Windows to display hidden files and folders so I can confirm that is not the source of the problem.

So, any ideas?

edge

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#93739 4-Nov-2007 22:12

Interesting! I just checked on my Vista machine. The D: drive (I have the drive partitioned - all the system, programme files etc go on C: and I use D: for data) shows 52GB used whereas the individuals only add up to 35.5GB. I did a very quick check on internet and these popped up as suggestions:

http://www.vergentsoftware.com/blogs/ckinsman/DisappearingDiskSpaceInVista.aspx
http://jayant7k.blogspot.com/2007/10/disk-space-on-windows-vista.html

It appears there is a hidden folder called "System Volume Information" that is hidden to Explorer. There is further comment on what it is there.

However, I would have thought this sort of stuff would have defaulted to my C: rather than D: drive?? I have a busy week coming up so may not have time to check further but it would be interesting to hear from someone who knows/finds out a bit more!

"It is useless to attempt to reason a man out of what he was never reasoned into."
— most commonly attributed to Jonathan Swift, author/theologian

bradstewart

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#93744 4-Nov-2007 22:44

The extra space is taken up by System Restore and Shadow Copies. You can tell Vista to delete all but the latest restore point by doing the following:

Open Computer > Right click on system drive > Properties > Disk cleanup > All users > More Options > "System Restore and Shadow Copies" Clean up

Over time this can take up quite a few GB, but as space bcomes limited older copies will be deleted automatically. Hope this helps.

alasta

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#93749 5-Nov-2007 07:18

bradstewart: Over time this can take up quite a few GB, but as space bcomes limited older copies will be deleted automatically. Hope this helps.

Thanks, Brad. That answers my question, and also explains why my free space seems to be gradually decreasing over time.

Karameadave

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#93762 5-Nov-2007 09:19

Have you checked out a sidebar gadget called Folder Slice?
Useful if you want to know the amount of space each folder on a drive occupies.
( won't show the system volume information but saves all that maths)

freitasm

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#94229 8-Nov-2007 09:21

Today I decided to uninstall a couple of programs and free some space up in the process. I have a 160 GB HDD on my laptop, and only about 10 GB free - strange because my files, including music, photos and documents are using about 30 GB, so where is all the space gone?

I was thinking of creating a new Restore Point, so I noticed there were some there and thought it would be a good point to clean them as well...

I got 60 GB back! 60 GB!

Slash

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#94240 8-Nov-2007 10:54

WOW! Good ol' Vista aye...

freitasm

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#94241 8-Nov-2007 10:57

No need for irony. It's not a fault, it's doing what's supposed to do: saving system snapshots from time to time so you can revert if needed to.

If space is needed the system automatically deletes old restore points.

The only problem is that you don't have visibility of how much space is used.