C-Partition gets bigger and bigger

whs said:

seekermeister said:

I never used that method to control the shadow copies, only vssadmin in the command prompt, and even when I reduced the space to the least possible (I think that it was zero) it did not delete the old shadow copies, the only way that I could get rid of them was to uninstall shadow copy ghosts in the Device Manager as I described. Deleting ghosts had no effect on what restore points were available at all.

That is strange indeed. I lost my shadows each time I mucked around with them - and even without intervention at times. Fortunately I do not really rely on them because I have frequent images. But sometimes they are more useful than images.

It's not that strange, because I only recently (within the last month), deleted all of my shadow copies in order to best organize C: for defragging, and then made a new one. While checking for this thread, I saw that I had 19 ghosts collected, and only 1 valid shadow copy. It is not totally clear to me, but it seems that any time that files are altered on C: to any extent, the system makes a new shadow copy, some of which are just added to other valid shadow copies. What causes a shadow copy to become a ghost is unknown to me as supernatural ghosts.

EDIT: I know that Windows Updates often creates a new restore point, which I assume means a new shadow copy, as well as some programs when they are installed do the same. This accounts for multiple valid shadows, but again, I'm uncertain about the ghosts.

When files are deleted, they do remain on the hard drive, but not recognized by the OS, and they do not show as occupied space in O&O, like ghost shadows copies do. I have no idea of why the files remain, since the OS can't use them, but if they were deleted from the MFT, then I would think that O&O wouldn't see them either.

You are correct about the OS making a new restore point periodically, but I can't remember what the interval is.

Ghost shadows will remain on the drive even after a defrag. I'm not certain about the space being reused, because that space remains locked...at least as far as O&O is concerned. That is the reason that I removed the ghosts manually myself, because they were occupying too much space. I can't swear to it, but I really don't think that the OS will overwrite that space either, unless it has no other choice. Shadow ghost are not treated the same as other files.

DeVandal said:

Is your pagefile on C? If Yes, is the size variable?

I do not us tools like ccleaner... perhaps it is NOT set to empty any temp folders, but rather set to delete generic temp file extensions (which your encoder may not use).

yes, pagefile is on C. This is the virtual memory, right (not sure here). If thats correct, then it says here "system managed" and not 'custom size', which means, i guess, that its size is variable? it currently has 4 Gb allocated.