Comments on: Drive distopia

Question: Drive distopia

gavia — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:27:12 -0800

Vista disk space filter: What's eating 190 GB on my computer?

So, my C drive is 229 GB. Windows Vista tells me I have 5-ish GB free (screengrab). When I run a program to see how I'm using the disk space (WinDirStat), it appears as though I'm only using 33 GB (screengrab). Any ideas what is going on here?

By: zixyer

zixyer — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:31:39 -0800

Try running scandisk. Right click on your hard drive, Properties/Tools/Scandisk.

By: majick

majick — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:32:14 -0800

Free space count is probably wrong.

chkdsk /f c:
and reboot.

By: holgate

holgate — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 09:38:11 -0800

The 'shadow copy' 'feature' might be eating it all.

By: gavia

gavia — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:07:23 -0800

Chkdsk / scandisk doesn't solve it.

By: rolypolyman

rolypolyman — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:13:10 -0800

I depend on the Sequoia View program to see what's eating space on my drives. I use Win2K so I'm not sure if this works under Vista or not, but it might be worth trying.

By: gmarceau

gmarceau — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:17:48 -0800

WinDitStat is an open source program that does what Sequoia View does.

By: gavia

gavia — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 10:24:35 -0800

Shadow copy it was (using 191 GB of space). This page explained how to find out how big it is and how to limit its space.

By: tracert

tracert — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 15:28:01 -0800

Volume Shadow Copy has been around since XP and Server 2003. It's analogous function is Time Machine in OSX. I don't know what happened to gavia but it's unexpected behaviour, not by design. In Vista, shadow copy is controlled in System Properties under the System Protection tab. Individual files are controlled by the Previous Versions tab on any file property sheet.