I am running Win 10 Home x(64) 21H1. I am totally mystified on this one. I have two HDDs installed. One is an old WD SATA II drive I use for file backup purposes. The WD drive is 250 GB with two partitions of 116 GB each. The WD primary partition shows disk usage correctly. However, the logical partition does not. Currently there is one folder/directory that resides on the logical partition that uses 17.5 GB. However, Windows show that 83.4 GB is being used on the logical partition. I have used all Windows options to display hidden/OS/etc. files and none exist other than the one mentioned folder. Plus, disk cleanup and defrag run for that partition. Is the only solution to this is to delete the logical partition and recreate it?
That's the size of the only shown folder on the partition. Will try chkdsk /r but have my doubts it will resolve the issue.
Sometimes folder size would not be specified correctly if folder contains system protected subfolders or files. Sometimes even running explorer with admin privileges would not show correct size because of that data. I would check content of that folder.
The chkdsk /r completed showing nothing amiss. I copied the last part of the output which again shows only 35GB disk space available: Of note is the above shows 87.4GB being used by files but none of those show: All the above folder contains is Win 10 File History backups. That is backups of C:\Users\xxxxxx\ user folders; i.e. Documents, Pictures, etc.. No way there would be 87.4 GB of data stored there.
I don't know what's going on but I would be copying such folder to an external drive and watch again.
I also don't know what's going on. But whatever it is, I don't like it! I attempted to copy the folder in the partition to another location. It informed me it was copying 8K+ files. This does however sync with what the posted chkdsk display shows and is an explanation for 87.4GB being allocated. The problem is where are all the files not accounted for in the only shown folder? In any case, enough is enough. I erased the partition and created a new volume. Currently running a full format on that volume.
I've had similar issue when I accidentally restored SQL database to wrong partition. It was restored in SQL server system protected folder and was not shown in explorer under used data size. I found out about that folder only after mounting Macrium image with option Enable access to restricted folder - then that drive space (20 Gb) magically re-appeared and I could then easily find problematic subfolder. I imaging that there was something similar in you case, which would explain 8K+ of files and missing space.
Everything back to normal. After partition reformat completed, I re-enabled Win 10 File History. 5000 files backed up using approx. 2GB. I will future monitor this partition for growth. In theory at least, File History is only supposed to backup new files. As such, can't see how this partition was using 100GB+ which was the status prior to when I started manually deleting stuff.
I found out what is "eating" space on this HDD partition and is a real "doozy." I store a Win 10 image backup in the other partition of this HDD. There is plenty of space available in this partition. This morning I did an image backup using the Win 7 backup utility provided in Win 10. After the backup completed, there was 6GB less space available in my yesterday created partition containing File History data. Now the total size of the Win 10 image backup was 62GB. Appears the Win 7 backup utility will just carve out a portion of another partition on the backup drive for use. Why is unknown. I also strongly suspect that this space is not freed up when another image backup is performed. Hence, how this partition space got originally consumed.
There are many imaging solutions in the market... and many are FREE. The last one I would ever consider using is the deprecated Windows Backup Utility. I have no idea why MicroSloth has kept that around as its OS has moved forward.
Hi @TheRollbackFrog. That completely puzzles myself as well, and here is why. For ANYONE who is ever experienced CustomRefresh commands. It was a super feature (reliable) strictly on the 8 platform and many found it a highly reliable rollback. Why Micro- didn't integrate THAT FEATURE as a failsafe into 10 is well beyond belief. While no substitute for a Back Up Image per say, it got the job done safely & efficiently. A user could reinvent the .WIM file at will anytime to update system changes.
I figured out what is going on. Each time the Win 7 Backup Utility runs, it's creating a System Restore point. Why this is done on the System Image option is beyond me. Worse is that I had System Restore disabled for the two volumes on the backup HDD, but the one with the created restore points on it for some strange reason had all available space reserved for restore points. You would think that Win 10 would only create restore points on the installation drive but it appears not so for the Win 7 Backup Utility.
Well @itman it's a relief i'm sure that you nailed down the cause of the affliction on your unit. Its no fun having good free space take hikes like that. Appreciate you sharing your findings and steps that you took to bring that "particular issue" to light.
I believe this was a remanent of a hidden rootkit I found on my Win 10 build. Eset had been warning for a while via their System Cleaner utility that System Restore settings were not set to system default values. I ignored it because I had disabled System Restore on the backup drive partitions. So I ran the Cleaner and wallah! Now my restore point size for a system image created via Win 7 Backup utility is 1.1MB or so. Now the question is what was the 5GB of data in previous restore points being used for?
You know something? That leads one to wonder a bit on lurking leftover(s), drop ins like that, but the System Restore feature is been a popular target for ages on windows. Apparently still is. And it leaves some users like me to wonder the WHY Micro-soft didn't at least refine and include the Windows 8 Custom Refresh WIM feature. If if if a user's restore points were either corrupted OR deliberately targeted and removed, Custom Refresh was a virtual 1-click solution to restore your PC without even deleting user installed programs. (just moved to a folder for review and reinstall) Short of a complete image restore (via Backup Solution Product) that feature alone (while not a replacement for a good image backup), served every one of my Windows 8 units for years and actually spared me on several occasions to having to resort to a image backup.
Windows missed a gorgeous feature Built-In to Windows 8/8.1 they could have just as easily implemented into Windows 10 as an alternative to go back in time and not that depreciated and lousy System Restore. It's one of those things Microsoft actually got right and proved efficient. Like a hybrid between restoring from an image and a system restore from a shadow. The best part is that the user files stay intact. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/fo...m-refresh-point-for-windows-8-and-windows-81/
