Is Vista Eating Up Your Hard Drive Space?

my god thank you soo much. Vista was taking up 45gb of space on my system.

Thanks alot. That saves me buying another hard drive. I saved 44GB of space.

sweet, thank you. It was using almost 50 gigs of my hard drive space… and I have never used system restore, ever.

i have a tb of storage, and for mine its max storage was 140 gb. WOW. I was wondering why i was using 290 gb’s. I wonder what other junk Vista is saving!

This freed up 14GB’s of space. i lowered it to 2GB’s. thank you.

thank you very much i freed up 21GB now im off to tell everyone i know with vista to do this. highly recomended thanks again

Thank you, i was wonder whay was happening to my harddrive space. saved me 40GB!

Dude thank you i was wondering why my harddrive was so low on space and i just got my comp

Thanks alot! I just saved over 33GB.

Tell me if you get a error, and no shadow info appears, would the shadow space be the issue?

You are my hero! I just freed 65GB on my hard drive! Every single day my hard drive was losing 2-5GB.

OOOOoooohhhhhhhuuuuuuuu

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thanks a lot my vista was eating 500 GB of space

LOL! LOL!

It freed up about 55gig of my hard thank you..

Hi!

Thanks a lot for the great tip man! Cleared up about 10GB in a matter of a few seconds! Am eternally greateful to you buddy!
Do update info about such vista tweaks!

It’s doesn’t work :(((( ( error ) like Joe

Thanks so much for this, was wondering where nearly 60GB of my 500GB drive disappeared to, this fixed it

(A)
1. Click Start button.
2. Type clean in the Start Search box.
3. Click Disk Cleanup from the search results list.
4. Select Files from All Users on this computer option.
5. Disk Cleanup will perform calculation to determine how much space it can free. Once done, click on More Options tab.
6. Under the section of System Restore and Shadow Copies, click on Clean up… button.
(B)

Also System restore in Vista takes huge space to store restore points. This is also Windows’ regular process. Kindly guide this customer to turn off system restore or to limit the space for system restore :-

1. Right click on Computer then select Properties.
2. In the left pane, click System Protection.
3. You will see a list of hard disk drives installed on your system, with checkboxes to the left. The check boxes with tick indicate that System Restore is on for that particular volume. So to to turn off System Protection for a hard disk, clear (untick) the check box next to the disk.

Just another way of doing it…

Thanks!

Thank you VERY, VERY much!! This is the 4th time I’ve restored my laptop back to factory because I ran out of harddrive space within weeks of doing to restore. As soon as I was done restoring there was 18.5GB used, I checked it again in about 15hours and it showed there was 88.5GB used and I hadn’t installed anything or added anything. So I followed you instructions above then checked again and I was back down to only 18.5GB used. Wow that was 70GB lost to Vista!! Again thank you so much!!

Whoa, thanks so much, that just saved me 17 GB!

Thank you SOOOO much!!! You are a life saver! I had lost over 350 GB of hard drive space and Dell support told me it was a virus.

Hi,
I bought a new thinkpad in Jan 08. Vista started eating 104 GB. I resized my shadow files to 2gb max. That bought me 13 gb. Then a patch came out around march that seemed to help and I again had 40 gb free. I’m only using roughly 50gb for all my programs & files. Slowly, the memory loss on my hard drive has begun to creep up again. What is wrong with this operating system? Please DO NOT tell me to defrag, cleanup disk, or reset shadow files. None work long-term. Plus I defrag every week. I clean up me disk almost daily now.
AAACHH!
I would appreciate some insight.
Thanks

cheers m8 i saved 40 gb ure lucky charm for coming up with this

THANK YOU VERY MUCH OHMYGOD.
THIS SAVED 22GB in My system:))

well. i’m just very very happy.:) thanks alot!

Thanks a lot i save 30 GB in my system

Thanks,
Now my laptop has 10GB free instead of 450MB

useful information

vista is using 70 odd GB for shawdow copy and system restore. I’d prefer to leave this on there considering i’ve used system restore numerous times, including when vista wouldn’t boot.

when i will, thank you

Great tips!

However, Ihave just done a fresh Vista Ultimate installation. After all the updates, and after doing the normal CleanMgr stuff and deleting the Windows Update temp installer files, my Vista ONLY installation (no other software) is using 13 GB.

Does that seem normal?

hi i try your steps but it not work it show invalid command i use vista ultimate

Thank you so much for the info.

btw the /On=C: /For=C: / was arranged oppositely. You have to type in For=C: first then /On=c:
anyway cheers for this help!
but i wonder what causes it to eat our hard drive spaces?!

this is bloody brilliant, i was just about to replace vista ultimate with xp but your method works wonders.. thank you

From the post: “I rarely ever use [System Restore]…”

Well, just because you haven’t had to restore your system before, doesn’t mean you won’t have to in the future. It’s not something you want to turn off completely.

thanks this is awesome i cleared up 30GB of my HDD space thanks alot

Thank you!!!
I was thinking of getting a solid state drive when I went to get an idea of how large of one I would need. My C drive with Vista was taking about 86 GB of space. I have a separate drive for my documents, so I knew that couldn’t be right. After trying everything I knew to find what was taking so much space, I found this site through Google, ran the commands suggested, and now I’m down to 20GB used space (66 GB saved).
I was going to forget about my solid state drive for a while since the cost for one that could hold 90GB+ was too much, but it looks like it’s time to give those another look.

lol this forum is like the show the BIGGEST LOSER.

How much space did you lose? lol.

WOW! Dude i owe you my left testicle! Freed up 30 GB!

thanks!
saved me 65 GB

I was wondering how I had lost 5GB in one day after deleting so much crap. Now I have 68GB extra. Thanks.

Hey thanks for this! I was getting frustrated with how I keep losing data after deleting. Now I just saved over 30GB.

thanks saved 15GB

Thanx alot mate..i juss saved 15gb..thanx again GREAT JOB..

HATS OFF…

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! I just took back 18GB!!! I was going out of my mind trying to figure out where in the world my hard drive disappearing to. I was uninstalling bloatware and running disk defrag and clean up and reg cleaners and I was losing GB instead of getting some back. You are a lifesaver and if I ever decide to have kids, you can have dibs on my firstborn.

salamat pare

Thankyou! My max size was at 80gb by default! Now it’s only at 2 thanks to your help. Every time I restarted my computer it seemed it was decreasing, again, thankyou.

Well, I must be odd man out here, all I get is at the Command Prompt is “No items found that satisfy the query?”

Yes, I followed the instructions to the letter, please don’t ask if I ran as Administrator, etc.

My ‘D’ drive says 148 GB with only 420 MB free????

Drive ‘C’ is 136 GB with 9.93 GB free but that is after all the usual disc clean up - where do I look for help from here?

Thanks, John

Thanks, I’ve just regained 65gb.

[…] can’t really be turned off, but it can be tweaked to use less disk space. The problem is discussed here - as is the solution. Just one more comment on you deleting large files on the D drive. Make sure […]

Thank you so much!!!!!!!!!

Thanks! I regained 81GB of my hard drive.

After using the command prompt as you suggested, I decided to try Karl’s option (B) and it solved my issue. Thanks Karl.

You sir, are a genius! Thanks a lot!!!

Wow, I was wondering why all my spaced was being consumed even though my computer was brand new and i had not put anything on it. Thanks for the info. Saved 23gb.

Thank you!

I bought a new notebook PC for college about four weeks ago and I was losing about 1.5 GB per day. After cleaning out the System Restore files and limiting Vista’s storage for them, I gained about 40 GB back!

I’m really happy this was a Vista problem and not a malware problem.

Thanks again! =}

Thank You! After a frustrating week of saving off files and trying to figure out where the space I was creating was disappearing to I now have 45GB back!

HAHA thank you so much! for months now I’ve been using my McAfee Shredder to get rid of these restore points! every week I would delete 10gb worth… I can easily say I’ve deleted 100gb of restore points. finally i put an end to that hahahaha thank you

HA HA HA HA HA

31gb RECLAIMED u a STAR m8

only purchase a new laptop couple months ago
head was getting screwed with the disappearence of disk space

GREAT M8 NICE ONE

Sigh, you don’t need to delete these, you don’t need to adjust the free space. In fact, you don’t WANT to do either. Windows will _automatically_ delete them as you use more space, and it needs to reclaim it. The only thing you accomplish by manually deleting them and lowering the limit is to limit how much backup data you have, and how far back you can go to get that REALLY important file that you aren’t sure how you deleted.. or maybe it was your cat, kid, SO.

This is like those memory “expanders” that chew up all the memory and then free it to show you how much “free” memory you have now; by tossing all of the ‘cached’ files out; “Free” memory and “free hard-drive space is wasted space. If you’re not actually “out”, why do you care what it’s used for if its holding more of your data?

Thank-you so much. You saved me 100gb of space.

Thank you so much.
You saved me 365GB!!!

Thank you so much! I was so distressed because my computer is only 6 days old and was losing hard drive space. I followed these instructions and quickly regained 40GB! I feel so relieved!