Vista keeps eating HD space?

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AMD_Gamer

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Jan 20, 2002
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i noticed something going on with my system i am running vista 64 on 300 GB raid 0 and every morning when i wake up even if i dont download or add anything knew space from my harddrive seems to disappear, last night i had 3.41GB now i have 600MB what could cause this?

i noticed this before but though it was normal as i donwloadl alot of stuff off bittorrent but now i figured out it does this even if i don't download or add anything new to the drive?
 
Vista will use up to 15% of drive space for system restore and backup functions, including "previous version".
 
It may be premature to blame Vista, especially if you're not downloading legitimate software off BitTorrent. Have you tried running a utility to see where the space is? One quick approach is to right click on each folder in your C: drive, and see how big it is.
 
i hope its not my raid 0 array being bad but i did not know that vista check that every night and marks areas as bad?
 
how do i see if anything out of place? i already knew where most of my storage is?
 
when i select show unknown it fins a 36.3 gig unknown section is that normal?
 
Edit... nevermind...

36.3g is pretty fuckin big.... 2-3g is pretty normal in my opinion... but not 36....
 
im looking on google and lots of people have this problem with utorrent but i cant find any exact answers,

also people are talking about shadow copies?
 
I have had this same issue as of late. I've seriously lost about 20-30 GB of free disk space. Every so often, I get about 10 GB of that lost space back. I've used NOD32 to confirm that it was virus free, cleaned and deleted...nothing. Hmm, hopefully someone will be able to chime in, because I'm in need too!
 
Okay... when you highlight the <Unknown> folder, what are in the treemap does it highlight with a white box?
 
i lost 3 gigs over night and i did not change anything

also i know people are going to rip my head off but i have all my downloads almost 170GB in a folder in my user profile and i index everything, could this be a problem?
 
Have you checked for viruses and spyware?

I just ran it on my Vista machine and I show 2.7g as <unknown>, but in reality it's the TrueType Font File... and that's it....

And sorry for my horrible grammar in that last post....I meant to ask what in the treemap is highlighted with a white box....
 
i always keep avg free running,

i never check for spyware but i will hit my system hard with hitman pro!
 
digital_exhaust said:
Have you checked for viruses and spyware?

I just ran it on my Vista machine and I show 2.7g as <unknown>, but in reality it's the TrueType Font File... and that's it....

And sorry for my horrible grammar in that last post....I meant to ask what in the treemap is highlighted with a white box....
Click to expand...

when i click unknown it highlights a massive yellow box the biggest one on the screen
 
You might want to try Housecall, or run ESET's online scanner.... I've had some problems with AVG lately....
 
AMD_Gamer said:
when i click unknown it highlights a massive yellow box the biggest one on the screen
Click to expand...

Yeah... that's the True Type Font File... I think the reason that it's tagged as <Unknown> is a glitch in the program, but regardless, it shouldn't be anywhere near 36g.....
 
Wait a second... I think maybe my above post may be a little misleading... is it one contiguous box?

Can you please post a screen shot of the treemap?
 
The exact same thing was happening to me, all of my hard drive space was disappearing, and I figured out how to fix it. You have to turn off System Restore. Your system will also run a little faster because it won't have to make all these restore points all the time. To turn it off do this: Start - Control Panel - System and Maintenance - System - system protection (on the right) - and then uncheck your main hard drive. This will automatically free up a ton of space.
 
Not sure if it works on Vista but check out a program called:

SpaceMonger

It does a directory breakdown so you can see where your space is going.
 
Okay.... I have no idea what that would be...

Do you by chance have a dual boot setup? If you have a non NTFS partition on that disk, I don't think WinDirStat is going to know what it is......
 
firebane said:
Not sure if it works on Vista but check out a program called:

SpaceMonger

It does a directory breakdown so you can see where your space is going.
Click to expand...

WinDirStat is essentially identical to SpaceMonger... except it works with Vista.
 
brydon10 said:
The exact same thing was happening to me, all of my hard drive space was disappearing, and I figured out how to fix it. You have to turn off System Restore. Your system will also run a little faster because it won't have to make all these restore points all the time. To turn it off do this: Start - Control Panel - System and Maintenance - System - system protection (on the right) - and then uncheck your main hard drive. This will automatically free up a ton of space.
Click to expand...

i will try this out but this is going on as we speak

i deleted some huge movie files to free about 12GB of free space about an hour ago, now i have 11.9 GB free:confused:
 
ok system restore is the culprit! i just unchecked my harddrive and freed up about 40GB of space or that unknown partition! i rescanned with WinDirStat and the unknown space is gone!

i will continue to monitor my free space and see if it goes down, i thought the system restore only took snapshots at night but i just saw a few minutes ago something eating away at my space?

i will continue to monitor this and report back.
 
Now that you have your major problem fixed, get a data drive and stop storing your downloads and user created files in your profile. Move them to another drive/partition.
 
DeaconFrost said:
Now that you have your major problem fixed, get a data drive and stop storing your downloads and user created files in your profile. Move them to another drive/partition.
Click to expand...

i am in the process of building a file server but i cant decide what setup i want, and on top of that i am really lazy when it comes to organizing my data, you dont even want to see how many icons/downloads i have on my desktop lol
 
i have not lost any hd space since i turned system restore off, i am going to do some more research into this and figure out why this was going on, and why i would lose almost 3 gb in a single night.
 
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