Disappearing HDD space

[Chris_]

Good morning all!

 

On one of our 2008 R2 servers we've lost about 140GB of hard drive space on one drive. It has about 20GB of data on and then had about 20GB of Windows Server Backup files. The rest of the drive should have been empty, but it reports as only having a few gig free.

 

I've disabled Windows Server Backup and removed the folder, that's only freed up the 20GB it was using.

 

I've run WinDirStat and it picks up ~140GB of 'Unknown Space'. Does anybody have any idea where this space is being used or how to claim it back?

 

Many thanks

Chris

[K.C.Leblanc]

Is shadow volume copy running?

[Chris_]

Is shadow volume copy running?

 

No. I checked that and it's disabled on this drive.

 

EDIT: I'm running a check disk now, not sue if it will make a difference.

Edited July 3, 2012 by Chris_

[CAWJames]

Does the drive hold any AD profiles? If profiles are locked down to user only, they won't report space used back to the logged in server user. Made me scratch my head a bit on the data server.

 

James

[AngryTechnician]

I've run WinDirStat and it picks up ~140GB of 'Unknown Space'. Does anybody have any idea where this space is being used or how to claim it back?

Did you run it elevated (as well as an Administrator)?

[Chris_]

Does the drive hold any AD profiles? If profiles are locked down to user only, they won't report space used back to the logged in server user. Made me scratch my head a bit on the data server.

 

James

 

It doesn't hold any AD profiles, it has some archived user home directories though.

 

Did you run it elevated (as well as an Administrator)?

 

I've just tried running it as Administrator and had the same block showing up as unknown.

[glennda]

run treesize free on it and see if it can tell you where its located.

[Chris_]

run treesize free on it and see if it can tell you where its located.

 

Thanks, just run that and it shows that it's a bunch of files within the System Volume Information folder. It's not letting me delete them though :/

[Mcshammer_dj]

Thanks, just run that and it shows that it's a bunch of files within the System Volume Information folder. It's not letting me delete them though :/

 

System Volume Information Directory Has Large Files

 

Also woth checking for restore points as they are stored there

Edited July 3, 2012 by Mcshammer_dj

[glennda]

Thanks, just run that and it shows that it's a bunch of files within the System Volume Information folder. It's not letting me delete them though :/

 

Thats problaby some Volume Shadow copy stuff

[SYNACK]

Have you run disk clean-up as administrator and gone to the second tab, there is a button to clean up previous versions. Not shadow copy but local rollbacks of system updates etc. Worth a try, usually works for me on W7 machines.

[Chris_]

Thanks all.

 

I followed this guide (

) and have reclaimed nearly all of the space

 

WinDirStat still shows about 14GB of 'unknown' so I'll have another look at that later.