Restore/Backup Faciliy fills up my Hard Drive to Capacity

Message

Scanvest · #1 Post by **Scanvest** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 3:15 pm

Hi there,

I bought a T43p with a 60GB HDD two months ago. I know that IBM creates a restore partition, so that I can effectively use only about 50GB!

I am using about 18GB of data for my programs/files.

Still, my computer keeps telling me that I am using 49GB of data and that it is almost full, and that I cannot defragment/add large files, etc.

Is this something to do with the restore/system backup facility, and if so, how do I free up these 36GB of data that I am not using?

I woule really appreciate your help on this,

Scanvest

christopher_wolf · #2 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 3:49 pm

If you aren't too worried about the hidden R&R area, you can make a bunch of recovery CDs first, then backup your data, and finally reformat the HDD and reinstall Windows and migrate over your data. That would free up that space on your drive; there are, however, many ways to go about doing this.

#3 Post by **GomJabbar** » Sat Dec 10, 2005 9:55 pm

If you have Rescue and Recovery backup to store the backups on your hard drive, that might be where your space is going. I believe there is an 'R' partition that contains these, that you can remove. Do a search on this forum for R partition.

Do a search on your hard drive for all files larger than 1 Mb. You should find any culprits this way. You need to have Search search for System folders, Hidden files and folders, and Subfolders.

Scanvest · #4 Post by **Scanvest** » Mon Dec 12, 2005 3:18 am

Hi there,

thanks for your feedback, guys. I found the source of the evil.

If you go to: Start > Programs > Thinkvantage > Rescue & Recovery

Here you get to manage all the backups that the Thinkpad kindly made for you.

I found out that apart from the Original Backup of 18.5GB, the computer had made weekly backups of 2GB each! So I just saved 12GB by deleting the last 6 weeks of backups.
I was expecting the software to make supplemental backups, but instead it created restore points that were useful, but took up an awful lot of space.

Thanks for your help on this,

Tilman

P.S. Vis-a-vis the R-Drive, it turns out that it is only 99.7GB in size, so that is fine by me!