Magically gained around 136 GB over a day

Hi there,

I am a little concerned.

I have a small HD, only 320 GB and I usually run hard up against the limit - anything between 4-14 GB free - until yesterday.

As I turned on my computer, I found that I didn't have 4 GB, I had 140 GB, which made me wonder if something big had been deleted by a new AVG virus scan or something. I really don't know.

After doing some searching, I found that sometimes this has to do with shadow copies. I found that my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage Space was something like 139 GB, although I have since then lowered it to 30 GB. The Used Shadow Copy Space is 3 GB and the Allocated is around 5 GB.

Did my computer just decide to delete shadow copies because it went over the 139 GB limit or should I be considering another possibility? Should I run a system restore? From what I can see, I don't think my files have been affected by the change in HD space and the number of 139 GB is quite a convenient number. The Shadow Copy limit might also explain why I always had such a low amount of memory and I couldn't explain why.

Anyway, any thoughts on why I have gained all of this memory?

Thanks

Windows deletes shadow copies periodically to make room for temporary files created during normal operations as they do occupy a major portion of any disk.
It also is wise to keep a liberal amount of free space if that's the only drive you have to give it "elbow room".
Even on a system with lots of space such as mine, very occasionally I've seen a popup that there's not enough room to create temporary files when installing major software, for instance.
I recommend you do an Extended Disk Cleanup every now and again, see the tute here: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/158356-extended-disk-cleanup.html

Ex_Brit said:

Windows deletes shadow copies periodically to make room for temporary files created during normal operations as they do occupy a major portion of any disk.
It also is wise to keep a liberal amount of free space if that's the only drive you have to give it "elbow room".
Even on a system with lots of space such as mine, very occasionally I've seen a popup that there's not enough room to create temporary files when installing major software, for instance.
I recommend you do an Extended Disk Cleanup every now and again, see the tute here: http://www.vistax64.com/tutorials/158356-extended-disk-cleanup.html

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But I suppose you believe that what happened with my system is that 130GB or so of shadow copies were deleted, given the extra space I now have and my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage?

Thanks

Free1234 said:

But I suppose you believe that what happened with my system is that 130GB or so of shadow copies were deleted, given the extra space I now have and my Maximum Shadow Copy Storage?

Thanks

Click to expand...

All we can do after the fact is speculate. If you have posted this before hand we could have helped you investigate and find the cause of the consumption but not now.

townsbg said:

All we can do after the fact is speculate. If you have posted this before hand we could have helped you investigate and find the cause of the consumption but not now.

Click to expand...

So what do you think could have caused my system to return so much memory and is there a way to check if anything large was deleted recently?

ex_brit's comment on the shadow copy sounds reasonable however I personally have never used it. As I started before all we can do is speculate. You can view and attempt to recover deleted files using rescuva however if nothing appears to be missing and everything works then you really don't have anything to worry about. If you previously reduced shadow copy than perhaps windows is only now implementing the changes. https://www.piriform.com/recuva