Where are all my Gigabtes gone?

[Sir Arun]

So I have my new machine (Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit SP1) since about two weeks, and was budy installing stuff into it from my old computer. To do this, I basically used to methods:

1) copy all my personal data from my external hard drive (about 115 GB)
2) install all my games (about 30GB)
3) I know what the Vista OS occupies roughly 30 GB

Anyways, so I checked my Hard drive (1 TB, actual space is 931 GB) and it reads that 663 GB remain (thus 268 GBs are occupied).

But after adding together all the GBs of my stuff (Personal Data folders + Windows folder + Program Files folder) I have a total of 140 GB.

So my question is...where did the extra 130ish Gigabytes come from? I cannot locate them! There is one other person registered to this computer, but that is only 2-3 GBs of extra data, as the person barely uses my computer and is on a holiday now, so hasn't gotten hold of my new comp yet.

Any help appreciated!
Cheers

 

[spinny]

It didn't just magically disappear unless you did some partitioning. You can try out a visual disk usage program such as WinDirStat to get an idea of how your space is being used.

 

[Sir Arun]

Thanks, I downloaded, installed and ran WinDirStat and this is the picture I got (I have opened the properties of my harddrive on the right to show how the data doesn't match. Yes, I run a German OS). And no, I haven't partitioned my hard drive.

 

[Sir Arun]

Another pic for clarity in case the first one isn't fully displayed:

 

[spinny]

It might be something like system restore points. I don't know how well WinDirStat finds hidden system files.

You could try this article for cleaning out system restore and shadow copies.

 

[Sir Arun]

PROBLEM SOLVED WOHOOO!!!!!!!

I disabled Vista's extremely annoying System Restore point function. I have a 1TB external hard drive and will copy all my data to it (overwriting old ones, of course) one per month, so I don't really need it.

Here's the link how to:

http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/07/27/change-and-set-vista-shadow-copy-or-system-restore-disk-space-limit-in-explorer-gui/

 

[spinny]

Glad you fixed it

 

[Sir Arun]

Yeah

Is there actually a way to tell Vista that it should only create ONE system restore point at a time and when creating a new one, should replace the old one instead of creating multiple ones, thus consuming a lot of space (which then have to be manually deleted except for the most recent one, time and time again)?

 

[spinny]

Not that I know of.

 

[Zoron]

System restore is only annoying until you need it. Doing a system restore is a lot quicker than having to reload and then copy your data back. Of course, if you're backing up a complete image of your hard drive, then that really isn't an issue.

 

[rockymeet]

Thanks, I downloaded, installed and ran WinDirStat and this is the picture I got (I have opened the properties of my harddrive on the right to show how the data doesn't match. Yes, I run a German OS). And no, I haven't partitioned my hard drive.

http://i133.photobucket.com/albums/q59/Agomades/Tech/wtf.jpg

Thanks for post. It’s really imformative stuff.
I really like to read.Hope to learn a lot and have a nice experience here! my best regards guys!
--
rockymeet
--