A bit of a flurry

I’ve not posted for a few days, but there are several topics I wanted to do something with. The problem was I was too busy to get on to it properly, and then when I started I found that my laptop’s hard drive was nearly full.

After several attempts to figure it out (virus scans, spyware scans, checking all my folders, watching the activity logs etc etc), I finally found out what it was. Anyone with Vista on their machine, check this out.

If you are seeing your hard disk space eaten up with files you can’t see (mine was up to 197GB out of 220GB, leaving only a few hundred MB after the data I could see), try this:

Open up a console in Administrator mode (Start->Programs->Accessories, right click on ‘Command Prompt’ and select ‘Run as administrator’). You should see a prompt line beginning ‘C:\Windows\system32>’

Type vssadmin list shadowstorage

You should get something that says something like:

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{a983975a-151a-11de-932e-000235a17ad24}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume:  (C:)\?\Volume{a983975a-151a-11de-932e-000235a17ad24}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 126.938 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 400 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2 GB

This is fine. If it’s bigger, especially if it’s much bigger, you can reduce the maximum limit with the command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=2GB

A message will come up if that works –  “Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association”. If not, then you should get a message to show what the error is.

After a few days of worrying about my machine having been set up as some ghost server for dodgy stuff, the relatively simple fix came as a great relief, but it wasn’t easy to find.