I have been running Vista Ultimate since November 2006 or so on my main system.  It has a 100GB main drive and recently started reporting only 5GB free. 

BgInfo a great utility would variously report 5GB free or 28GB free.  I couldn’t figure out why it kept changing it’s mind.

SpaceMonger which I frequently use to find big files was reporting only 5GB free and I didn’t see any large chunks of disk space in use.  I got suspicious and added up the blocks of in use disk space and realized they only added up to 60GB!

I grabbed a demo copy of FolderSizes and tried the same thing.  Low and behold my c:\System Volume Information folder was 35GB!  Not only that I didn’t have permissions to see what was in it.  After looking around on Google I figured out that Restore Points could take up to 15% of the disk.  That by my math indicated 15GB not 35GB but I figured I would see if I could clean a few up.  I fired up the Disk Cleanup Manager for Windows and selected “Files from all Users on this computer”.

On the next dialog I selected the C drive.  It scanned the disk for awhile and showed me a few options.  I selected the more options tab and then clicked the Clean up… button under System Restore and Shadow Copies.

Clicked this and Voila 30GB of disk space reappeared.  Now the only problem is I have no idea how to set the maximum space System Restore and Shadow Copies can use on my system.  Anyone have any ideas?

Friday, February 23, 2007 5:10:30 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)         Comments [2]