Altered C Drive Space Remaining

My C drive contains about 20 GB of data on my 80 GB hard drive. I've created a few full and incremental images of this drive, deleting the old ones before making new ones. My most recent full image of my 20 GB data produced a 30 GB image. I then deleted this image. My hard drive is now showing only 3 GB of free space! I've tried emptying the recycle bin, using the disk cleanup utility in Windows, inspected the drive and windows with Nortons Utilities, tried to use GoBack to revert to the time before the last image was created (couldn't use GoBack since this was such a large file), and Windows System Restore. Nothing works. My hard drive thinks I have only 3 GB of free space.

Any suggestions would be GREATLY appreciated!

 

The problem turned out to be with the Norton Protected Recycle Bin. Although I deleted the 10 to 30 GB drive images, Norton was still reserving this space on my hard drive. Purging the protected bin got me back my disc real estate.

 

I'm glad you have recovered your 'lost' disk space. I was typing a reply when I saw you'd resolved the problem. However, running the risk of boring you senseless, I thought you might be interested in the way I have now set up my systems using TI and GoBack.

I have only recently started to use Goback again since version 4 has been released as I found that I was quickly running out of usable Goback history on version 3. That was probably down to my limited knowledge of how it worked

With version 4, there is now the option of a 8GB buffer plus the Safe Try mode which I've found useful. This time, however, I decided to try and set things up a bit more sensibly.

In my ideal setup I use two hard disks. In my less-than-ideal setup (ie my laptop which won't take an extra internal drive) I use an external drive for backups.

Concentrating on my ideal setup, I have the first drive with two partitions. The first partition is the Windows system partition and the second (about 12GB) is my Goback and swapfile partition.

When installing Goback, I have the second drive either disconnected or hidden from Goback so that it doesn't get monitored at all and I select the 'swap' partition for the location of the Goback history. This means that I can use TI to backup the C drive without backing up 8GB of history which would be lost on a restore anyway.

The same goes for the swap file. I set this to be a fixed size (1.6GB) and locate that with the Goback history file. Now I know that TI now only backs the swap file up as a placeholder and so doesn't have any impact on the image size but, if I ever use anything else ( ) to backup my C drive then the swap file is not going to be backed up as well.

The second drive is also partitioned into two. The first partition is for the installation of any large applications or games (Myst IV has just taken up 8GB of it ) which can be easily re-installed as necessary. Savegames etc are regularly backed up with Nero Backup. I use this partition for downloads as well, especially any particularly large ones, so that these are not tracked by Goback. The second partition is for the TI backups of the C drive.

This way, Goback is not monitoring the TI backups of the C drive and so not using up valuable history space.

I also have System Restore turned off as this is a) being tracked by Goback and b) doubling up on Goback's function.

Finally, I turn off the Recycle Bin as this is a) being tracked by Goback and b) any recently deleted files can be easily recovered via Goback.

The upshot of all of this is that my C drive becomes relatively small and easy to back up and the Goback monitored disk activity is kept to just the essential stuff .

The backups are also committed to DVD fairly frequently.

On the laptop, I have a larger 'swap' partition which doubles as the 'Program Files' partition. In this case, Goback will be monitoring the changes so large installs will have an impact. TI backups go to the external drive.

It works better than it reads

Hope some of this may be of use.

Oh...and if I need to defragment a Goback monitored drive then I always disable Goback first.