Deleted archives stored in hidden system volume file

How come when I delete an archive on an external hard drive it still is held in the hidden system volume file? My virus scanner took forever to finish scanning my external hard drive because of these legacy old deleted archive files that should NOT be taking up space. I noticed on the file that the antivirus scanned to find the old deleted archive fdisr files that it said ...system volume/_restore.

So does this mean that potentially these old deleted archive files can somehow be brought back to life because of the word "restore" on the system volume file? I don't have a virus. Why are these deleted archive files still taking up space? I had numerous deleted archives so this bothers me as it took too long for my antivirus scanner to chew through them.

What gives? Normally this system volume file is a hidden file but I chose to show operating system files just to see what else was on my external drive. I guess that if I had chosen to keep operating system files hidden the antivirus scanner wouldn't have bothered to scan the file in the first place but it brought up the point that the old archive files should not still be hanging around.

 

Which folder do you mean,Recycler or System Volume Information ?

 

Hello,

No it's not a restore point, I turned that off before I installed FDISR. As for the recycle bin I'm not sure. These old archive files are from previous builds of my machine. I've rebuilt it from scratch a few times by wiping it and reformatting it. During those times I always had the restore points turned off but I might have had the recycle bin on in these old archives. Either way the recycle bin was too small to take the deleted archive files anyway. My recycle bin is usually set at 3.99 gb and my archive files are always bigger than that. I'm just curious why these old archive files that are supposed to be deleted can still be scanned by an antivirus scanner? I wonder how the recycle bin setting affects how the old archives get deleted. Perhaps we should talk about how to set up the recycle bin setting to avoid conflicts if the size of the archive getting deleted is larger than the size set on the recycle bin itself by defualt which is usually 10%. I've noticed however that when FDISR deletes an archive it doesn't go into the recycle bin even when it's turned on and can accept large files the size of the archives. I guess that's when it get's tucked into the system volume information file instead of going into the recycle bin?

 

Here is a picture of the defrag image plus the size of file I have on the external drive that has NO archives in it. Notice the file size is only 800+ mb. Then notice the size of the defrag image. Every little blue box indicates 66.24 mb. There should only be 13 little blue boxes then to show the size of the file to equal 800+ mb yet I have many many more. Hence I wondered what else was on my external drive and I found some deleted FD archive files with the .arx extension. Why would a degragger need to degrag a deleted FDISR archive file? Plus what are all these A0000123.exe type files that are in my hidden system info folder on the external drive as well? I doubt a freespace wipe with eraser would change anything if the defragger still catches the deleted .arx files. Why are they still there? I noticed when I create the archive it is one size yet when I transfer tha archive back onto the main drive the size increases. I could chalk that up to maybe the log files but now I have my doubts.

 

I figured out how to change permissions on the system volume file folder and deleted the contents of it and now all is free space again thanks to a new defrag. Had no problems deleting the old .arx archive files from fdisr this time. This only happened on my external hard drive and NOT my main hard drive since I double checked that too. I'm just glad it wasn't some kind of virus hoarding files inside there. Whew!