Free Space (Vista)

JohnK

Can someone tell me what the hell is the deal with free space in vista? It keeps jumping all over the place and I'm not talking about a few mb's here and there but of up to 30 GB freeing up for no reason.

Just two examples are
1. The other night I had 10 GB free kicked off a 4 GB download and when I got up the next morning the download had completed and I had 14 GB free :eek:

2. Moved 15gb of files onto a portable HD yesterday so total free space up to 21gb which I had checked before going to bed last night yet this morning I have 54.3 GB free and I haven’t done anything except switch the machine on :eek:

I don’t have drive compression turned on so it just seems very weird to me. If it makes any difference I have a HP Pavilion dv6500 (laptop) with 250 GB HD & 2 GB ram running Vista Home Premium.

dr.bollocko

I have DV series HP too mate, never seen this jump at all personally. I always knows how little is left in my HDD, similar to my bank account only more important, and I havent seen fluctuations like this.

Sherifu

Run spacemonger a few times between fluctuations to track down what's happening.

JohnK

Cheers for the replies. Its a new laptop and my first time with vista so not really too sure what to expect but such vast variations do seem a bit odd however its been happening since I first got it 2 months ago. I've not come accross any missing files either to account for the extra space which is the really weird thing. I've run spacemonger and will keep an eye on it, 30gb is a big enough chunk that I should spot it if it happens again!

dr.bollocko

Its certainly something to keep an eye on. Personally I havent heard of this partic. Vista issue before so I would be concerned its a pointer to a more serious issue.

JohnK

dr.bollocko wrote: »

...so I would be concerned its a pointer to a more serious issue.

Thats what I'm afraid of

dr.bollocko

I have looked a bit more online for you with this. I would think its possibility a system restore point / paging file issue? Perhaps Vista is cleaning house in the background with old versions of system restore, then generating a new restore point, which could see fluctuations of a fair few GB. Also found this . Also, the Vista SP1 beta is available for download if you wanna give that a blast. Some info here on what it helps with. Also the HP recovery disk is creating a few problems for users with hogging GBs in files that cant be found. And there's also this, just in case you havent opened up the box yet and had a look.

JohnK

I've turned off System Restore but it only freed up about 700mb and none of the backup apps say there are existing backups so that should rule them out.

You might be on to something with that cat, I've heard some strange meowing around here lately!

Sherifu

Still it seems like a lot of space for System Restore alone. Let us know if you find the problem.

dave13

I actually had this same issue this week. I've a vostro 1500 running vista ultimate. i noticed I only had 900MB left on the drive, so I deleted a folder containing 4GB, checked a little while later and I had 18GB free, next day I had 11GB. I wasnt doing any major downloading or any work other that browsing the web. Was very odd.

mathias

It is most likely a combination of system restore and shadowcopy , if you regularly move large chunks of data then shadowcopy is going to make your hard drive free space amount jump all over the place ,

You can see how much of your hard drive is being used for this by following this , http://www.wikihow.com/Reduce-Shadow-Copy-on-Windows-Vista

And you can also reduce how much space it uses as well.

JohnK

I ran the command to list the amount of storage space being used by shadowcopy and it says theres nothing there.

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin List ShadowStorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

No items found that satisfy the query.

mathias

Thats strange , it should have showed something !

junkster12345

no harm to back up ur data bud just in case there is something going on with ur hdd, probably not , because its new, but sure better safe than sorry .

Capt'n Midnight

How big is the swap file ?
remember it can change size , a couple of GB would seem plausible but 30 sounds a tad much

JohnK

mathias wrote: »

Thats strange , it should have showed something !

Yes strange alright but I did run it as an admin (ie. right click on cmd shortcut and "Run as Administrator"). If I did it from a non-admin account it says I dont have permission.

junkster12345 wrote: »

no harm to back up ur data bud just in case there is something going on with ur hdd, probably not , because its new, but sure better safe than sorry .

Yeah I suppose having backups is never a bad idea its just I have a shortage of HD's at the moment and 200gb that'll need backing up. Might be about time I bought a few new ones only I'm a bit short on cash since buying this fancy new laptop a few weeks ago

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

How big is the swap file ?
remember it can change size , a couple of GB would seem plausible but 30 sounds a tad much

pagefile.sys is 2.29gb
hiberfil.sys is 1.99gb

Voodu Child

JohnK wrote: »

I've turned off System Restore but it only freed up about 700mb and none of the backup apps say there are existing backups so that should rule them out.

As well as turning system restore off, you have to delete the restore points it's already created.

JohnK

Turning it off gets rid of them automatically or at least it does in XP

Overheal

CLONE!

I have the exact same make and model. God we're cool.

Can't say I've ever noticed fluctuations. However are you running torrents? Once you begin a torrent the client automaticaly reserves the file space for that download. Once you start say a 2gb download, that 2gb is taken up even though technically there is nothing there.

This can be seen win you run WinDirStat <-- I love this application.

30gb free... pfft. I just wiped it a month ago >_> ah how data flies...

JohnK

I havent done anything with torrents in ages and even in that case once it takes the space it would just use it rather than freeing it up later on so I dont think thats it.

JohnK

Sweet Jebus its at it again! Had done a bit of downloading lately so had 31gb last night, downloaded about 1gb overnight and this morning I would have expected to see 30gb free but no I have 34.8gb free :eek:

Sherifu

I think we all know who to call.