Defragmenting hard drive decreasing disk space by 74gb (!!??)

[Alice]

Hello,
I'm new here, thanks in advance for any help! I did search to see if I could find a relevant answer for my question, but I didn't really know what to search for so didn't have much success in finding anything - sorry if this has been asked before!

I'm using a 1TB hard disk, it's quite new - about five months old - a western digital one. I've been doing lots and lots of rearranging/deleting files in the past few days, so I thought it'd be a good idea to do a defrag. Before defragging I ran COMODO system cleaner to do a registry clean up, a disk clean up and an applications clean up (internet files etc). These all ran successfully and did free up some space. After this I ran Auslogics disk defragmenter.

Before defragmenting my hard drive had exactly 500gb free space...Now it has 426gb of free space - where did my 74gb go? Any suggestions on how to get them back?? The defragmentation report says it went from 42.79% fragmentation before to 23.55% fragmentation afterwards, so it did defragment, but surely if it's just rearraging things it shouldn't be using masses of space? Or is this just the way with big hard drives? (My last was 250gb, so 1tb seems huge to me!).

Thanks again,
Alice

 

[Jelly Bean]

Hello Alice and welcome to the forum.

Sorry for the delay in giving you help.

This is possibly Vista backup and restore.

Follow these instructions and decrease system restore.

1/ Click Start
2/ From the Start menu Click All programs followed by Accessories
3/ On the Accessories menu Right Click on the Command Prompt option
4/ From the drop Down menu that appears, click the Run as administrator option
5/ When the Command Prompt window opens type: vssadmin list shadowstorage and Press Enter
6/ The results should read something like this:
C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.
Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C\\?\Volume{db8e056a-6294-11db-9f9f-806e6f6e6963}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C\\?\Volume{db8e056a-6294-11db-9f9f-806e6f6e69
63}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 197.766 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 400 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2.092 GB
7/ In this example the C: drive is 19.5GB in size. The currently used storage space is 197.766MB and the Maximum space allocated for System restore is 2.092GB.
8/ The current stored system restore points are 2. this can be found out by using the vssadmin list shadows command.
9/ In my opinion the 2.092GB Maximum shadow copy storage space is quite acceptable for this size of partition. However, the larger the drive/partition the more space will, inevitably, be allocated for system restore points.
Reducing the Allocated Space

To reduce the allocated space we need to use the Resize option in the form of:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[here add the drive letter]: /For=[here add the drive letter]: /Maxsize=[here add the maximum size]
Let us assume that we wished to have a maximum size of 2GB from this particular partition/drive. The command line option would look something like this:
C:\Windows\system32>vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=2GB
So to put this in to practice you proceed as follows:
1/ Click Start
2/ From the Start menu Click All programs followed by Accessories
3/ On the Accessories menu Right Click on the Command Prompt option
4/ From the drop Down menu that appears, click the Run as administrator option
5/ When the Command Prompt window opens type: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[here add the drive letter]: /For=[here add the drive letter]: /Maxsize=[here add the maximum size] and Press Enter
6/ if all goes well you should see a message saying 'Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association
7/ Your System Restore shadow storage has now been resized

 

[Alice]

Hello,

Thanks for your help - and sorry for my delay in replying!

Well, something strange is definitely going on - I switched my computer on today after not using it for a day and my free space is now at 486gb free without me even doing anything! (I'm fully up to date with virus stuff and am apparently virus-free, just to add) I will definitely try what you suggested but that will wait until the morning, I don't trust myself not to mess it up in my current tired condition

I was going to partition this drive when I bought it, then my ex (who liked to think of himself as very computer savvy) said it wouldn't make any difference but I seem to have eaten the space very quickly...I'm sure it is vista deciding to use all the space it possibly can. In future, if I had time to partition it and do a clean install, or if I upgraded to windows 7 would it be worthwhile to partition it so that the windows partition only had x-amount of memory or is it more hassle than it's worth?

Thanks again for your help,
Alice

 

[samuria]

If you partition the drive it means

1 if windows crashes you can have your data safe on the other partition.
2 You can create an image with something like Acronis of windows on the second partition so if it crashes you can get it back in 20 mins or less
3 It can save a lot of defragmenting

On your figures the defragmentation isnt doing a very good job I would expect it to be less than 10% when done more like 3% as this may need boot time defraging

 

[perfectpitcher22]

Defragmenting your computer’s hard drive every few weeks or so ensures that your hard drive is working smoothly and running at its top speed. Anyway, you need about 15% of your hard drive cleared if you want your disk defragmenter to work properly. However, even if you do not have such amount, you can still decrease or increase the amount of space available to perform the procedure.