Is Vista eating my HDD space?

joshua1

Hi all, I've been borrowing my girlfriends laptop and have somehow lost 20gb of her 140GB HDD...... and by lost I mean I can account for everything bar 20GB. This is the first time using Vista Ultimate, or any Vista for that matter and is there some crazy shiny vista thing causing this? The only things I've been doing on it have been updating her software (via automated hardware update) installing office '07 and playing music. I'm pretty sure she won't be impressed with my mathemagical ability to lose empty space. Any help would be great. Cheers.

BlochWave

Well some of your HD space always goes to your OS, it does have to be stored on the computer somewhere >_>

Office, especially the new one I'm sure, takes a fair bit of HD space. I'm looking at my add/remove programs list(what you should do too!)and I see MS Office Pro 2003 is 355 mb, I've got Visio pro 07 which is 529 mb(you most likely don't though), hell my business mail client thing is 200 megs! On my work laptop here, I've got(with XP)10 gigs used though

I have Vista at home, I'll check when I get there if this isn't resolved by then, which it probably will be. Check around though, that HD space gets eaten up pretty quick without you even knowing about it usually. It's normally not a couple of big things but six dozen tiny things

Kate of Lokys

A program like SpaceMonger might help you see exactly where the space is being used.

Rook

It could be the System Restore function, you can turn it off if you want, but I think it's a nifty feature.

joshua1

hahah, yeah, I know the OS is taking some of the space BlochWave, but its still out with the OS included in the count. Even if Office was taking up around 1-2GB (a large overestimation) im still out by 18GB, so I have sorta discounted that too. I have a sneaky feeling that it might be this SysRestore, since I have been setting up a restore point before I install any potentially screwy software (daemontools etc.)

All in all, this experience so far has made me dislike Vista, even though it is so purdy. 'tis sad.

BlochWave

To be fair, if it's the system restore, that'd be your fault, not Vista

wunderbar

well, ya, system restore is probably the culprit, especially if you do a restore point often. What do you think system restore is, a txt file with settings in it? It has a lot of data to put into each restore point.

XP would do the *exact* same thing if you did restore points often, that is *not* a feature of Vista only.

Ruckus

Could be system restore, could be a chunk of HD space reserved for swapfiles, depending on how you determined harddrive space/use it could be the manufacturer's service partion (on my HP it takes about 10GB).

DrFrylock

Also note that some of it may have disappeared because of differing definitions of a Gigabyte. If the hard drive is listed on its marketing materials as being a 140GB hard drive, then it has 140,000,000,000 Bytes (that's 140 decimal gigabytes) of storage. But most computer programs like operating systems measure in binary gigabytes. 140 000 000 000 Bytes = 130.38516 binary gigabytes, so you can "lose" 10GB of storage easily just because of this issue. There's an effort to draw a firm distinction, where "GB" means decimal gigabyte and "GiB" (abbreviation for "gibibyte" and pronounced, awkwardly, gih-bee-byte) to mean "binary gigabyte." A couple of gigs might have disappeared into a hidden system-restore partition as well that many manufacturers set up these days.

Or it could just be System Restore.

joshua1

But I have only made 2 system restores, that shouldn't take 20 Gig? right? And im using the the vistas HDD management size thingy (the piechart thing), so I don't think its a definition problem. So, I guess the question is, can 2 system restores = 20GB? Oh, its also not the manufactuer's system restore point, I took that into consideration.

BlochWave

From google

Disk space used by System Restore by default:
•

For drives greater than 4 GB, System Restore uses up to 12% of the disk space
•

For drives less than 4 GB, System Restore by default only uses up to 400 MB of disk space
•

The data store size is not a reserved space on the disk and the maximum size (to the max values defined above) is limited at any time by the amount of free space available on disk. Thus, if disk space use encroaches on the data store size, System Restore always yields its data store space to the system. For example, if the data store size is configured to 500 MB, of which 200 MB is already used, and the current free hard-disk space is only 150 MB, the effective size of the data store is 350 MB (200 + 150), not 500 MB.
•

Note that disk space usage can be adjusted at any time

victor_c26

It's system restore. You'd be surprised how much space it takes up.

The last time I disabled and enabled System Restore in Vista, 65 gigs were shaved off. 65 GIGS

Though I highly doubt it's System Restore alone. Back up/Shadow Copy might be bunched up with the System Restore toggle switch as well.

stigweard

BlochWave wrote: »

To be fair, if it's the system restore, that'd be your fault, not Vista

There is no way with Vista, aapart from drudging through the registry, to set system restore to use anything other than 15% of your hdd space.