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Tuesday, June 02, 2009

Vista Problem: Filling My Hard Drive

I ran into my first major headache with Windows Vista. After I added a second internal hard drive to my system, it quickly began to fill up, to the point where it is now 99% full. But I am only storing about 40% worth of stuff on it!

At first, i was worried I had a virus or something, but then I remembered about Vista's Shadow Copy feature, which copies old versions of files so that if you make a change and you want to undo it, you can restore a previous version.

I found this article which explains how to dig into the settings for Volume Shadow Copy. It turns out that somehow, Vista decided that the shadow copy settings for my D: should be UNBOUNDED, which means, copy until the drive is full!

I was able to use VSSADMIN to fix it, following the directions of the posting. I simplay ran this command as an administrator:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=D: /For=D: /MaxSize=50GB
Note to Microsoft: Volume Shadow Copy should default to a safe value, and not to UNBOUNDED!

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I had also the same problem and i solved this issue through your article , thanks a lot for your article.

www.iyogi.co.uk

Anonymous said...

Hi,

you have a virus on your computer: Windows Vista ;-)

Really, this (and other) behaviors of vista keep me busy when supporting my girlfriends notebook. I just bought her the new one with vista, to get rid of all the problems, the old one provided, because its hardware really was too old.

But the new one, as if it would have a virus, it is slowing down, loosing disk space, memory and so on. At the end, I always find out, it is a vista issue. But what bothers me most: vista provides a lot of help texts, but reading them is senseless, since it explains nothing but treats you like an idiot.

I would not know what to do, if there would not be the web and blogs like yours.

I am totally pissed (sorry) about vista and hope, windows 7 will solve all the problems, otherwise I will return to Windows XP (or Linux).

Thomas