Vista Hard Disk Space Shrinking and Reducing Anomaly

Windows Vista is running normally and properly, no blue screen, no error, no problem and it seems that everything is fine. However, the free disk space that is available kept reducing and shrinking to less and less amount. The free space can decreases by up to a few GBs a day, even if you do not download any big files, receive any big attachments or engage in file sharing or file transfer activity with your peers.

Worse still, even if you delete a lot of large files away, or run Disk Cleanup to clean and free up a lot of downloaded program files, temporary Internet files, offline webpages, hibernation file, junks in Recycle Bin, setup log files, system error memory dump or minidump files, temporary files, thumbnails and archived or queued Windows Error Reporting files, the problem won’t go away. The space is still anomaly and abnormally low, and getting lower, and it seems like it’s going to running out of space. And, if you manually add up the size of each folders taken up on the disk drive, the total free space appears far lower than the supposedly value.

This symptom is probably caused by the usage of disk space by System Restore and Previous Versions (collectively called Volume Shadow Copy). Sometime, Windows Vista mistakenly marked the maximum space limit that can be used by Shadow Copies to be Unbounded (no limit), and that’s where all the disk space program comes in.

VSS Unbounded Limit

For immediate relief from space constraint, you can reclaim and release all System Restore and Shadow Copies used disk space. For permanent solution, it’s best to set the limit for Shadow Copies space usage, or you can turn off System Restore (and Shadow Copies and hence Previous Versions) all together.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 4th, 2007 at 3:28 am and is filed under Windows Vista. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

21 Responses to “Vista Hard Disk Space Shrinking and Reducing Anomaly”

  1. mastan
    October 8th, 2009 23:54
    21

    @ Stuart Gregg queried on July 8th, 2007

    Don’t howl at me that this question was asked 2 years back and you are posting comment now :) . This is because now only I got this problem and the solution, luckily. I had to delete the temporarily offline files and all offline files stored in the network. this actually occupies space in hard disk. Go to control panel->offline files->do whatever is appropriate to you. additionally, change the limit of the offline files space usage to avoid future suffocation.

  2. karam
    August 14th, 2009 00:37
    20

    I have the same winsxs problem how can i getred of it.???? its 7 GB now help help ??

  3. Stoooo
    July 21st, 2009 04:10
    19

    you seem to be forgetting the winsxs folder, it may be that you’ve not actually “lost” the hard disk space, but explorer shows all of the “hard Links” as used space when its actually only a link, this annoys me as 2 days after a reinstall the winsxs folder is “using” 11+Gb!!!! its about time Microsoft sorted this problem of incorrectly showing usage…

  4. tim holdredge
    July 9th, 2009 10:10
    18

    IF YOU ARE RUNNING TREND MICRO, IT MAY BE EATING YOUR SPACE ON A DAILY BASIS. IF IT’S MORE THAN A FEW HUNDRED MB, YOU HAVE TO GO THROUGH TREND’S CUSTOMER SUPPORT TO FIX IT.

  5. Pikachu
    January 23rd, 2009 01:53
    17

    Yeah I did most of what was said here..I only got like 4 GIGS back!!

    Just the other day I had 170+ gigs..yesterday it went all the way down to 102!!! and today its back to 119 from 115.

    WHY IS IT DOING THIS?!

  6. Mike
    December 18th, 2008 21:07
    16

    see i have a similar problem.
    I have an hp laptop with vista sp1 i initially had about 198gb free space and ever since it has been reducing every time i log on to windows.i did not install any big file. but i uninstalled a few previously installed ones. Now i find that i have only 166gb free. Even when using the pc it reduces i.e. it was 168gb when i loged on but now only 166 i didnt do any thing it keeps reducing no virus detected no use using disk cleanup. the funny part is in C If i select all folders including hidden it shows 195ggb free! help

  7. Anthony
    October 14th, 2008 15:09
    15

    Kiruban, please give details on how u managed to resolve this problem thx

  8. Kiruban
    October 4th, 2008 04:57
    14

    Hey guys.

    Here is the solution for that vista getting hungry and eating your hard drive dilemma.

    Just run into your services and kill the damn Shadow copy service…Its set to manual but just kill it totally by disabling the service.

    Took me a million years to figure it out but I did it and now it works like a charm…

    Happy slaughtering of your shadow copy service…hehe.

  9. Steve
    August 27th, 2008 03:33
    13

    I was wondering why I lost free disk space after uninstalling several programs. Thanks for the insight. After turning this off, my free disk space increased about 15%.

  10. Problem mit Speicherkapazitaet (vista) - PC-WELT - FORUM
    May 20th, 2008 05:47
    12

    [...] Vista zu tun, also gehoert dieses thread woanders… Wer dasselbe Problem hat kann hier gucken: http://www.mydigitallife.info/2007/0…ucing-anomaly/ __________________ Was ist eigentlich besser? : Dem Raptaras, der etwas Ordin

  11. jz
    May 12th, 2008 15:52
    11

    This is one of the reasons I still use XP. I tried Vista for a month and had tons of problems including this one. Yes, everything can be tweaked, but what’s the point of having to work and tweak to end up with something slower than XP? As for the aero, it was nice, but after 2 days I hardly noticed it anymore. And dx10 was the biggest loss, but even that wasn’t a big deal.

  12. Ananth
    May 9th, 2008 00:49
    10

    Hi! Thanks for the tip! Solved my problem.

  13. james becquart
    May 1st, 2008 06:28
    9

    this is just a small bandaid for 1 of the many reasons why vista is going down the toilet like win m.e. did. in fact vista is just an updated version of win m.e. obviously they did’nt think we would remember. do yourself a favor get ubuntu linux for free and make it your own.tell bill you are’nt as dumb as he thinks.

  14. Consumo anormal de espaço livre em disco no Windows Vista « Anderson Sala
    January 24th, 2008 22:15
    8

    [...] Fonte: My Digital Life [...]

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    September 9th, 2007 00:05
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    August 29th, 2007 06:14
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    [...] Fonte: My Digital Life [...]

  17. Consumo de HD anormal no Windows Vista « Vida Binaria
    August 21st, 2007 21:37
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    [...] Fonte: My Digital Life  [...]

  18. Olexandr
    July 9th, 2007 07:01
    4

    I guess you could try my folder size utility – Dirlot to determine what takes the most of space on your disk. Then you will be able to make further assumptions as to what caused it.

  19. Stuart Gregg
    July 8th, 2007 01:48
    3

    I have done all this but am still loosing disc space all the time. Turned off everything (hybernation, system restore etc) uninstalled Halo 2 (giving back 4.5 Gb) re-booted and was told drive had 3.5Mb spare !

    Any help greatly appreciated.

  20. Consumo anormal de espaço livre em disco no Windows Vista : Led Nerd
    July 5th, 2007 08:42
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    [...] My Digital Life (No Ratings Yet)  Loading [...]

  21. Evan
    July 4th, 2007 18:41
    1

    please check the follwoing annoiing VISTA behaviour:

    even when i disable all or most services i can think of (superfetch, indexing etc. sidebar etc.) VISTA is constantly accessing the harddrive!!!!

    it´s not like XP where the HD is idle when the PC is idle. NO vista touches the HD all few seconds.

    that sucks big time!!

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