Please help me with this baffling conundrum. Yesterday I had approx 2-5 GB free on my 1TB drive. I ran chkdsk and there are no errors on the drive. I don't know how I now have 100 GB free? How can I check if data has been erased? I checked most files and it looks in-tact. Should I run system restore?
Is the OS installed on this drive?
What was reporting the free space ?
Generally the drive you have Windows on no matter what flavor shouldn't be allowed to go under approx. 15% free space of the capacity or you'll have issues.
Not sure how to check shadow storage. However, I did check the system restore point and they have all been erased. I had been meaning to clean up my system for a while but I thought I could get away with it for little while. I still can't figure out what windows may have erased to get 100 GB of free space back. Any ideas?
The OS is installed on the C: drive. Chkdsk reported the space as 103 GB free as well as going to my computer clicking on C: drive and viewing properties.
How can I tell what was erased? I can't even go back to a restore point at this stage.
For a 1TB disk, you have a default shadowstorage of up to 150GB (15%). So it is very possible that 100GBs were freed up if all the shadows were erased.
You check shadowstorage with an elevated command prompt. Type vssadmin list shadowstorage and hit Enter. Allocated is what is currently taken and Maximum is what will be ultimatly taken.
Used Shadow Copy Storage Space" 1.096GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage Space 3.249GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage Space 137.548 GB
Is it possible then since my storage space went down so low (I was DL torrents the night before) that Windows deleted shadow storage to make room for the torrents being downloaded? I find it remarkable that windows would just do that automatically. Still baffled, usually you get the low disk space warning messages (which I got plenty of).
You really don't need 137GBs of shadowstorage. 20GB would be enough. I suggest you copy/paste the command below into an elevated Command Prompt. That will set it to 20GB (good for 20 to 50 restore points - depending on how much the "used" space of your C is). You can change the 20 to any number if you think you should have more or less. A restore point is appr. between 250MB to 1GB.
Note: that will also delete the current shadows, but you have hardly any anyhow. So it is not a big loss.
Suggestion: Why don't you offload some of those files to an external disk. From the size of it I suspect them to be Music and Videos. But they work just as well from an external disk.
