Where is my disk space going?

Mike Connor · 29 Apr 2011

whs said:

Mike, you made me curious. I think I will try Easeus one day. A long time ago (on Vista) I had a bad experience once with it. Since then I had not touched it. But I am sure that was either my own mistake or it has been corrected.

But the Macrium boot disk problem I have not seen myself. I run it on 6 PCs (desktops and laptops from 2007 to 2010) plus on a few of my friends systems. And have made recoveries on all those systems. Must be a driver restriction in the Linux part.

Vista was one of those things I personally "skipped" ! Like "2000" and "ME". :) I had to mess about with them occasionally on other machines, but that was never a particularly enjoyable experience!

The boot disk problem with Macrium occurs a lot here. It doesn't like a lot of the low-end on-board graphic chips, and a number of the ATI cards as well. I corresponded with Macrium about it, and they did offer some solutions, but they weren't worth my time to implement.

I still think the product is good, I just accept that it wont work on some machines. I have not yet found a machine where the Easeus stuff does not work. I like their partition manager too.

Regards....Mike Connor

dsperber · 29 Apr 2011

Just in passing, I'd like to recommend a NON-FREE software product named "Treesize Professional", which I've been using forever.

This is a super-slick, useful, worthwhile, helpful, informative, user-friendly (and anything else you can think of that's a positive adjective) to provide exactly the kind of information which will tell you EXACTLY what your usage is, on all of your drives (including network drives if you want).

Detail lists, pie chart, bar chart, ownership details, create date, modify date, last access date, analysis, history, etc., and you can perform standard Explorer functions within its own standard Explorer interface.

Click on column headings, and sort the rows by the information in that column (click again and it's in reverse sequence by that column)... so it's either alphabetical, by-size, by date, by whatever... Or, you can just push one of the buttons on the button bar to sort accordingly.

Customize the columns shown. Customize the flyout help.

Ok. I have no personal interest in this software, but I use it so much and have done so for years that I really must recommend it. It gets 5-stars from me.

And it would have easily shown the "System Volume Information" folder as the "culprit". And yes, clearing out old unneeded restore points as well as reducing the setting for the creation of new restore points is the obvious proper long-term solution.

Again... HIGHLY RECOMMENDED for exactly this kind of use, not to mention just a terrific utility to have in your arsenal.

Treesize Professional. Try it. You'll like it.

Mike Connor · 29 Apr 2011

Looks pretty good, but I like this;

GetFolderSize download and reviews from SnapFiles

integrates into explorer if desired, and is free.

Regards....Mike Connor

whs · 29 Apr 2011

Mike, now that you mention it I remember it was their partition manager that mucked up my Vista OS partition. Fortunately I had Ghost14 images and could easily recover.

There is one restriction I had noticed with the Macrium recovery CD. It does not work with USB3. I had made images on a USB3 external disk and had to restore via USB2 - but that worked. I suspect that this is also a Linux driver problem.

Mike Connor · 29 Apr 2011

whs said:

Mike, now that you mention it I remember it was their partition manager that mucked up my Vista OS partition. Fortunately I had Ghost14 images and could easily recover.

There is one restriction I had noticed with the Macrium recovery CD. It does not work with USB3. I had made images on a USB3 external disk and had to restore via USB2 - but that worked. I suspect that this is also a Linux driver problem.

Indeed, I think some of the earlier versions were not too reliable.

I only tried Easeus on Windows 7 because I had problems with Macrium, ( as you say, a Linux driver problem most likely), and some other programs. I am really pleased and satisfied with the results, and would not now revert even if I could.

Regards....Mike Connor