disk space on windows vista

Disk space on windows Vista

Recently i got a new lappy with windows vista. And within 2 weeks my

disk usage went up from 25 GB to 34 GB. Though all i had installed was

a few small softwares.

Ever imagine where the disk space goes when you are using windows

vista?

What i did was i logged into linux and did a du -Sh and found that

there was a hidden folder "System Volume Information" which was around

10 GBs and the folder was invisible in windows explorer. And then

there was this hyberfile.sys and pagefile.sys taking up 2 GB each.

So windows is chewing up 14 GB of disk space for its processing in

addition to the installation size of 6 GB.

System Volume Information is used by windows to store restore points

for the system. The larger the volume, the more restore points it can

store and the more restore points it can offer in case of a crash.

In my earlier lappy, i had windows xp and i had reduced the size of

restore volume to 500 MB using some slider available somewhere. Though

i never had to use the restore option in my 2 years of usage. I had a

crash and had to reinstall windows again.

But in windows vista, i was unable to find such slider. And so i

googled for "System Volume Information Disk usage windows vista" and

found some cool links explaining the complete funda.

One of the most interesting links was this which explains in detail

the use of restore points.

Well to make a long story short open up the command prompt (right

click and do "run as administrator").

Then run vssadmin list shadowstorage, it will give a list of available

shadow storage points ("System Volume Information"s' in the system -

there is one on each drive). How much space is allocated and how much

is used.

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin list shadowstorage

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line

tool

(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{3ce0cbe2-57c2-11db-a712-806e6f6e6963}\

Shadow Copy Storage volume:

(C:)\\?\Volume{3ce0cbe2-57c2-11db-a712-806e6f6e6963}\

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.335 GB

Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.539 GB

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 10.395 GB

Now list down all the shadow storage points using vssadmin list

shadows. And check out the number of restore points. Remember, your

storage space should be large enough to have atleast 1 storage point.

But i generally dont care for windows, cause, even if it crashes, all

you could do is reinstall. I doubt "restore" would work...

And finally reduce the shadow storage size

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /For=C:

/MaxSize=3GB

Rerun the vssadmin list shadowstorage command and check the amount of

disk space used now

C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin list shadowstorage

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line

tool

(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{3ce0cbe2-57c2-11db-a712-806e6f6e6963}\

Shadow Copy Storage volume:

(C:)\\?\Volume{3ce0cbe2-57c2-11db-a712-806e6f6e6963}\

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.347 GB

Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.389 GB

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 3 GB

Bingo and now you have around 7 GB freed up.