C drive shrinking

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rusty12

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 2, 2007
Messages
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I'm not exactly sure if this is the best place for this question, but its the best spot I could think of.

I noticed yesterday when I opened "My Computer" that it was saying my C drive had only 286GB of free space. I haven't really installed anything major lately and last time I could remember my free space was around 301GB...Today it now says I have only 285GB of free space left. It went down a gig in one day.
Why would my hdd start filling up with god knows what all of a sudden? i've deleted as much stuff as I can think of but it dosent really do anything cause its all less than a gig. I just don't understand whats going on. Any thoughts?
 
I'm almost sure it's system restore. Try cleaning your C: directory with CCleaner it'll certainly help you.
 
definitely pr0n

hes probably downloading or viewing a lot of it and much of it is left in his temp folder.

but yeah, run CCleaner first, and see what happens.
 
Yeah, sounds like system restore....that's why I set how much HD space it can use to 1% which, with a 320GB primary drive, is still about 4 gigs of space!
 
Although do remember that System Restore actually uses Volume Shadow Copy, which also implements Previous Versions. So the more space you give it, the longer back Previous Versions will work.
 
Just run the drive cleanup utility and clear all of your restore points but the most recent. It will free up a lot of space. That is of course if you prefer the space to the restore points.
 
I prefer disk imaging tools, rather than something that typically hasn't worked in solving the problem, but that's just my own experience. I do also remember with XP's release, most AV software vendors recommended turning it off, so I still follow that suggestion.
 
Thanks for the input guys. I still need some help however. When I open up System Restore, I don't see any option where it allows me to set the size limit I'll allow for it to set restore points. Can someone help me locate this option. I read the MS FAQ regarding system restore and all I could find in that is how to turn it off or on.

I also ran CClearner and it just deleted like 60megs of random crap, so that didn't help to much unfortunately.
 
I think you actually have to do it by the command line. If you have UAC on, open an elevated command prompt (right click the Command Prompt shortcut, 'Run as administrator'). Type:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

to see how much space it's using, and:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=[size]

where [size] is a number of KB, MB, GB etc., eg. 600MB or 4GB. If you want System Restore to still store a decent number of restore points, don't make it too tiny, at least a few gigabytes - Vista restore points are much larger than XP ones as it keeps more data. When you resize the shadow storage, it may delete existing restore points/Previous Versions.
 
Or you could right-click on my computer, go to properties, and click on the system restore tab.

There you can specify how much space is allocated to it.
 
Those instructions don't necessarily apply, since this is Vista. For XP, that would be the method of doing so.
 
1) System restore by default is 10%..or 20%. Set it down to 1 because 500gb = 50gb restore files!
2) run ccleaner
 
Default for Vista is set during Setup to 15% of the volume or 30% of the free space, or 30% of the volume on a volume that you use for storing Complete PC Backups. You can't change it through the UI, and you also can't set it to a percentage - you have to use vssadmin to set a certain number of megabytes/gigabytes.

50GB will probably store you 20 or so Vista restore points, versus about 1000 in XP, because Vista keeps more data, allowing more reliable/robust restores and also permitting Previous Versions (the same restore points are used for both features).
 
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