Windows 7: My Recovery Drive (D:) Almost Full.....

Hey there,



I'm just wondering about the recovery drive I have, the (D:) drive is almost full, and I was just wondering what should I do when it runs out of space? My friend has his recovery drive full as well and needs help, which is why I'm posting this. I was told not to modify or even touch anything in the drive because it is a backup of the system or something? Well I don't know what to do because my friend's recovery drive is full and he's getting a notification on his taskbar about it, I have 1Gb left and was just wondering as well since most of mine is used up. Should I just leave it? Thanks for the help.

I'd get a larger drive, and use Acronis or Paragon partition managers to dupe the drive onto the larger partition.

Tell me about it... I started with 250GB Hard drives in my XP system, when I Upgraded to Win 7 I had to get 320 GB drives, then 500 GB drives, and finally 1 TB drives. Right now I have 2 500 giggers, they are totally packed... Last month I bought another 1TB drive, it is totally full now. I just don't know where the space goes, I absulutely require everything I have saved, cos I build and repair computers, I have to keep an exhaustive library of Drivers, OS's. I even run a program that allows me to read my Mac partitions as if they are attached right to my PC.

If you are not sure about what you need... And if your backup is bursting at the seams, then do this:

1) Check your system - Make sure it is in absolute perfect order, no little glitches. If that is the case then:

2) Delete your entire Backup drive. Sounds drastic, but if you are in no danger, you should be OK.

3) Once you clear ouot all that space, just make one Brand New Backup, and then tell your Backup program to make a Backup ONLY When you tell it to.

Cos it counds like you have some kind of Automatic Backup going, I'd dhut it off, do it manually, cos if you keep going, your backup partition will soon get totyally filled.

Ideally, you want to keep all of your drives about 1/4 full for best computer performance. Now myself, I keep them 80% full, causes me a lot of problems cos I'm a packrat, cant affor 6 2 TB drives to move all my storage onto, so I gotta keep all my archives on sevreral partitions.

If your system is working well and you have at least half of your system drive free - Then delete your backup drive.

But only if there is nothing on that drive that is not on your System drives... If you are saving a lot of Documents and ISO images and pictures, you may want to keep only those on a separate drive, other than your System backup drive.

Can you post a screenshot of your disk management layout?

Screenshots and Files - Upload and Post in Seven Forums

Your recovery drive will be less than 20GB and should not be used for anything other than recovering your system and should never be used for storing your personal data.

If you delete the recovery drive and you haven't created a set of recovery discs you have no way of getting your system back without a Windows disc if everything goes pear-shaped.

I think that once the recovery drive has been created it is not changed. It is used to return the PC to its factory state after all.

There are two things you can do
1/Go to Control Panel, Backup and Restore. Have a look at the two snips I have posted for details.

I think the op is talking about the 12GB recovery partition not the drive he is using for his backups.

Oooops!! then my bad

Perhaps the op can post back and confirm which drive it is.

This is my understanding, so it should not fill up. Hence my misunderstanding lol

I have asked the OP to post a screenie as I think we all strongly suspect he and his friend have been using their respective recovery partitions to store personal data.

The key for me was when he mentioned he'd only got 1GB of drive space left, which with today's large drives will take some doing, but on a 12GB recovery drive it won't take very long.