Win 7 install on a 40gig drive is filling up, why?

whs · 22 Jan 2010

1Bowtie said:

I'll bet system restore is turned on, which is creating restore points. That will eat space in 6gig chunks.

Smitty

In Win7, the shadowstorage is allocated as a function of the partition size. Not like Vista where it is always 15%. Given that the OP has only a 40GB partition, it is probably not more than 3GBs. But even that he can save if he has a good imaging plan with his Acronis.

1Bowtie · 22 Jan 2010

Sorry bout that WHS, i was thinking how sys restore use to work, i personally make backup's so i haven't messed with sys restor in Win 7. Thank for the info though.

Smitty

whs · 22 Jan 2010

No need to apologize Smitty. If it was Vista, your number would be right - 15% of 40GB = 6GB (which would be the shadowstorage maximum).
Win7 is quite iffy when it comes to shadowstorage. All kinds of things happen. The other day someone had a setting of more than 100% of his partition as shadowstorage. The system ate all the storage the man had on his disk - in about 3 months time. Even Brink was puzzled.
The fact that you can easily set the amount of shadowstorage with the slider seems to bear some dangers. I preferred the vssadmin route - at least not every noobie knew how to play around with it.

bounce · 30 Jan 2010

hmm wasn't getting my subscribed updates to this for a few days. Here is the pic of how I had my system restore (shadow?) settings on the C: drive.
I've also included a pic of a "tree size folder" tree to show where some of the space is. The strange thing is as you can see in that pic it says I have files in my recycle bin, but the recycle bin window I've opened in front of it has 0 files.

This temp file filling is driving me crazy, I'll delete 20 gigs and by the end of the next day my drive is full again. That can't be normal?

1Bowtie · 30 Jan 2010

From the looks of the images you have in your last post you didn't click Apply and OK to make the settings permenent. Also where are all those temp files comeing from? That's where i'd start looking.

whs · 30 Jan 2010

Plus you did not click on "Turn off system protection".

bounce · 01 Feb 2010

actually I had gone back and was playing around with the settings and forgot to set them to how they were when the problem started, like this:

Tepid · 01 Feb 2010

Here is a nice tool to see what are the biggest files and where storage is going

WinDirStat Portable

bounce · 01 Feb 2010

I've been using tree size free which essentially does the same thing, some of the biggest files are in my recycle bin. So what I'm doing is clicking on the file and in tree size and opening the "path" to the recycle bin, but it is empty when I open it.
Pic includes tree size/everything (search) / and recycle bin. Any clues on why there are no files in recycle bin, but they're showing up in search and in tree size?

zigzag3143 · 01 Feb 2010

bounce said:

I've been using tree size free which essentially does the same thing, some of the biggest files are in my recycle bin. So what I'm doing is clicking on the file and in tree size and opening the "path" to the recyle bin, but it is empty when I open it.
Pic includes tree size/everything (search) / and recycle bin. Any clues on why there are no files in recycle bin, but they're showing up in search and in tree size?

Those are all tmep files. you could right click tree size and delete them. But I am sure someone has already suggested that.