Losing Hard Drive space

Where are you getting the numbers in your formula from?

could be your hard drive is starting to fail that happen to a friend it lost up to 50 gb and then it stopped working all together had to get new hard drive

537GB free of 686GB. So that's 149GB used somewhere.

Looking at properties for the drive shows the entire drive using the 149GB (or 148GB some rounding going on).

TreeSize says C:\(OS) is 120.8GB. So that's my question where is the ~28GB? Computer shows it all accounted for on C:\(OS) but TreeSize does not.

Is it restore points? Are restore points included in the Computer's properties but not in TreeSize? That could explain it but as mentioned I have 30GB and I'm "missing" 28GB.

I'm not necessarily trying to reclaim lost space just trying to understand where it is and most importantly why I seem to be losing 1-2GB a day. And the 1-2GB a day is not going to C:\(OS) as that number (currently 120.8GB) doesn't increase by 1-2GB a day.

back up your data seems like it is failing incase maybe i am wrong but when hard drive's start to fail they losing gb's

It's a six month old drive on a stock HP desktop. I suppose it is possible it is failing but my last hard drive never failed after 6 years. Data is backed up. If it is going to fail it better do it before the warranty is up.

I'm sure there is an explanation for this but throwing all these numbers around and using different programs to analyze disk usage is really confusing me.

Britton30 said:

System Volume Information isn't included since it is not accessible. Did you disable Hibernation? Using it sometimes cause file corruptions.

Type cmd in Start Search, right click cmd, Run as Admin, then type in powercfg -h off. Reboot and check your used space. This turns hibernation off and deletes the hiberfil.sys file.

hiberfile.sys while large is also not increasing. I can delete it but that's really not what I am after.

You are saying that Sys Volume Info isn't included in TreeSize.

Is Sys Volume Info strictly restore points? Is it also true that Computer does include it and that is the difference between the 120.8GB and 149GB that I see? Would almost work except for the slight difference in numbers as explained above.

Joan Archer said:

Sorry for butting in but wanted to clear something up. You said in an earlier post that you were using 30 GB for System Restore, can I ask just how far back does that take you because you really only need to keep at the most about 2 weeks of restore points.

No problem. I'm open to all suggestions/comments. The 30GB gives me restore points going back one month. I can reduce the usage (currently at 5%) to only have two weeks worth but figured with the hard drive size it was no big deal. I think the default was this amount or even higher. On my XP machine it had restore points going back months.

I'm still trying to understand if it is the restore points that are my "missing" space.

Basically it comes down to this:

Computer properties tells me 149GB is being used. Does this include restore points?

TreeSize shows 121GB on C:\(OS). Does this exclude restore points? If yes to both I am close to accounting for the space but still a bit off, unfortunately it's the wrong way .

These Microsoft FAQ's may be of help to you.

System Restore: frequently asked questions