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Is Vista Creating Duplicate Files of Everything?

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tinjaw:
A friend of mine called me today with a question about Vista. He is installing MS Office and his anti-virus software and he claims that everything is taking up twice the space it does on his XP computer. I told him it sounded just like Microsoft, in its infinite wisdom, felt it was a security enhancement to shadow all of the files "for enhanced security". Can anybody verify that my guess is correct?

Crush:
I think it´s not Vista, it´s the installer. I removed today my $Installcache$ - everything there was a copy from the installed files - rather useless.

wreckedcarzz:
Unless he is using Windows Vista Ultimate with the shadow copy feature, no, Vista isn't doing this. Only Ultimate makes shadow copies. The programs may have to apply additional patches for Vista or something. :-\

MrCrispy:
Shadow copies are only made for data thats changed, and only when you create a restore point. So no, its not like Vista is making duplicate copies of your files.

f0dder:
A lot of installers for download-from-the-web applications tend have the first "setup" simply extract the next set of setup files to some location, and then you run the setup from there to actually install the app.

Another thing that might be causing this could be Vista's use of NTFS Junctions... at least on international copies. Ie., on Vista you always have "%SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files", and the international name (like the Danish "Programmer") is just a NTFS Junction redirecting to "Program Files". This doesn't take up extra space since it's a redirect, but software that doesn't know about Junctions would obviously show both folders and probably report 2x the size.

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