Help, hard drive space loss

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CrimsonTears

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Jul 19, 2007
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I noticed my 1tb hard drive was slowly losing gigs when I wasn't downloading anything. I've been logging it for a few days and I'm losing around 80 megs a day. This is with no downloads and deleting internet files. This is a few format with Vista 64. I do minor surfing and a decent amount of torrents from trusted sites.
 
Check which folders are large in size and monitor them if you wish to locate what is growing
 
CrimsonTears said:
I noticed my 1tb hard drive was slowly losing gigs when I wasn't downloading anything. I've been logging it for a few days and I'm losing around 80 megs a day. This is with no downloads and deleting internet files. This is a few format with Vista 64. I do minor surfing and a decent amount of torrents from trusted sites.
Click to expand...

That is System Restore doing its work, turn it off and you will see a major increase of space.
 
Ah thank you, I was wondering for a long time. I'd had the pc for 1 year and lost a lot of space. It doesn't delete after a certain amount of time? Is it easy to turn off.
 
Actually would it happen several times a day even when I don't change anything? From 1 pm to 5 pm today there was an 80 meg increase while I was away, nothing changed.
 
Alright, I will keep watching, do you happen to know the max it will take up per day and overall?
 
I checked the restore points, there was none made when I lost the megs. I think it is a virus, no other way. I've check the system restor and it's not that.
 
Vista keeps track of every single change to every single system file as time goes by and stores that data and every backup of every file as well as every change to every file (system files) in the WinSxS folder. Over time, that folder will grow to be considerably large as as time continues to go by, it will get larger. It can result in a fairly large portion of drive real estate that appears to be "missing" as it's a hidden system folder and won't show it's contents on most directory listings, soooo...

Keep that in mind as System Restore is not the only folder or component of Vista that slowly gets larger over time. Every time a system file is modified, a backup is made of the "original" one before the change, the change info is recorded, etc - this happens consistently and all the time, especially when dealing with Windows Update. Download a 40MB update, it extracts to 80MB or larger, the 40MB file is backed up, the 80MB extracted content is backed up, then the changes are made to the system files - those are backed up before the change, then backed up again after it, etc.

That's why after a clean install of Vista that takes 10GB of drive space suddenly takes upwards of 14GB after hitting Windows Update just that first time and grabbing all the updates that exist right now after a clean install of Vista SP1. Most people don't get that, but that's the reason, and yes System Restore (if functional) does contribute also, but that can be deleted and started over to regain some disc space - the WinSxS folder never gets deleted, it never "shrinks" because it's a safehouse for system files just in case you need to revert to a previous file for compatibility issues.

And of course, the advice always stands: Leave it alone.

The WinSxS folder is a major component of the OS; tampering with it in any way or trying to delete the contents will result in pretty much catastrophic issues because of it.

Good luck...
 
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