Where did my (free) HDD storage go?

[jamess]

I just discovered I've only gor 17 GB left on my 64 GB SSD. Total of 17 GB is under Users and 7 GB under Program files. All the rest is 1 GB, totaling in about 25 GB. with Vista business 12, which sums up to total of 37 GB. I should therefore have 64 - 37 GB = 27 GB. Instead, I have 17.

I don't have any backups on the SSD (that would be hidden or something). Can somebody help me out here? Where should I look to find some strange huge files that I can delete.

Regards

EDIT: I don't use hibernation funcition at all. SSD is too quick. I either Stand by or Shut down. How do I disable Hibernate, it's eating almost 3 GB!

[qviri]

I should therefore have 64 - 37 GB = 27 GB. Instead, I have 17.

64 "GB", or 59.6 real GB. You should have 22.6 GB left, but that's a nitpick.

EDIT: I don't use hibernation funcition at all. SSD is too quick. I either Stand by or Shut down. How do I disable Hibernate, it's eating almost 3 GB!

Code: Select all

powercfg.exe /hibernate off 

in administrator mode command prompt should do the trick.

[jamess]

Still - where's 5.6 GB gone?
==

Tried that - doesn't work though. Fn + F12 still goes into hibernate mode Any other ways to turn the hibernation off completely?

Thanks!

[jflamm]

If you go into the power options in the control panel you can disable hibernation. I have XP so the exact sequence is different. Thanks for pointing out that Fn-F12 still puts the machine into hibernation. What I found is that it still hibernates - but after you awaken it - you can just go into the power options and disable it again and the space is immediately freed up. This is nice since it will never hibernate or use the space unless you explicitly command it to (in a crunch) - best of both worlds!

I am running XP and I have about 30.5G free with all applications installed - including MS Office, Adobe CS3, Visual Studio etc. I will get another 4G once I remove the recovery partition which you can also do with Vista. I use Acronis and just made a USB boot flash drive and put the backups on an external drive. You can also free up space by lowering the Virtual Memory page file - I do not know how to do this offhand on Vista.

[beq]

To the original poster, it could be HDD storage space used by the Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS), which is used by System Restore, Previous Versions, etc. You can turn off System Restore.

Or you can use the vssadmin.exe command-line tool in Vista to check and resize the allocation and maximum storage sizes.

open a cmd window in elevated (administrator) mode and check:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

then resize:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage [/options...]

[jamess]

Storage used: 2 GB
Storage allocated: 4.9 GB

In this case, I guess I know where 5 GB went...

Do i need this much of shadows copies if i do regular backups and only need to restore one to two points back via windows restore (say after an installation or something..)

Thanks

[SHoTTa35]

to disable hibernate just right click your HDD in Computer and go to properties then click disc cleanup. Click All users option and then see your hibernate file. Check the box and click clean up.

Your pagefile is probalbly 4GB also so you might want to tune that. Go to System Properties, Advanced System Settings and then go to the Performance Section and click settings. Go to the Advanced tab and click change at the bottom. From there you uncheck automatic settings and then enable "custom...." and set your sizes manually. I use 256MB to 512MB. You might want to use up to 1GB but you decide.

Remember to click SET before exiting that window otherwise the settings wont take.

[jamess]

@SHoTTa35: Thanks, worked like a charm!

[beq]

Just remember that Vista's power management GUI doesn't have an option to re-enable hibernation. To enable you'll have to type 'powercfg /h on' in an elevated cmd window.

As for shadowstorage size, I usually resize mine a lot lower when I have a good imaging schedule.