Something is eating up my harddrive space

[kathygarman]

Hello,

I am running Windows Vista on my system. I have a 500 GB hard drive. A few months ago I deleted about 40 GB or photo/jpg files to free up some HD space...a few hours later it had actually gone DOWN more than 40 GB. A few days ago I moved 100+ GB of pictures to free up space and within an hour I went from 120 GB free space to 4 GB free space! There is nothing left to delete! I have no music, no videos and no photos on my computer anymore...just program files. there are quite a few of them but no more than there have always been and I used to have 250 GB free! Now I can hardly run any programs and definitely cannot run photoshop which is what I mostly use my computer for...but it tells me there is not enough memory. Where can it all be?!! Please help!

I looked through the old forum questions nad it suggest changing the amount of space system restore can use but when I follow the instructions it just takes me to a button that actually DOES a system restore...nothing about how much space/how often etc.

 

[kathygarman]

I also just ran TreeSizeFree and it only seems to account for 64GB of usage and it accounts for all the main program files I think should be there. It shows at the bottom that the free space is 13.8 GB of 455GB. I scanned it twice...maybe I am doing something wrong...just scanned the C drive which is where the problem is.

 

[kathygarman]

Just remembered...a few months ago my c drive was reading in the red with say 50GB free...then one day it suddenly dipped into the blue and read like 250 GB free...then it all got gobbled up again! Could it be shadow copies or something?

 

[JDFan]

How long has it been since you deleted any backup restore point files -- They can take up a lot of HDD space fairly quickly if you have it set to make restore points daily and do not have it set to delete any after awhile -- Go to My computer - right click on the HDD and select Properties on the general tab click on disk Cleanup - After it calculates the amount of space you can recover on the Disk Cleanup box go to the More OPtions tab and click cleanup on the System Restore and Shadow copies -- Note : this will delete all but the most recent restore point so if you have been needing to restore recently you might want to wait to do this until you are sure you have a good restore point to use !! -- I had not done it in awhile and just now was at 220 GB used 11.1GB free on my C: partition and doing this I now have 186GB used 45.1 GB free so gained over 30 GB. by simply deleting the extra restore points !

 

[kathygarman]

Me again...did the command prompt to check shadow storage and it says it is using 380.323 GB!!!! Can that be right? It also says the maximum storage space is UNBOUNDED (apparently!)

 

[kathygarman]

Haleluia! I changed how much space was allocated and just got back 100GB! I said it could use 75GB so that doesn't seem to add up to 380 but I am not too worried about that! Now I can use my computer again! Thanks and sorry to work this all out on here but maybe it will help someone! Whew!

 

[kathygarman]

One last update...after a restart I now have 327 GB of free space on my hard drive! I almost did a full system restore! Ack!

 

[JDFan]

Yeah - VISTA has a bad habit of doing that to the HDD space if you use the default settings as it keeps making restore points and shadow copies without ever deleting them ! Glad it all has worked out.