Need to track missing space on my Hard Drive

[icekin]

I've suddenly lost about 13GB of space on my hard drive. Its literally lost. WinDirStat and Treesize report that the size of all the contents on the drive is 10GB. The drive is 27GB in size. Yet, I only have 4 GB of freespace. Somehow, there resides a set of files or folders on my drive that is occupying about 13Gb and is invisible to windows. I would like to know if there are any tools that I can run from a CD, loaded into RAM at bootup that can track missing space on my hard drive.

I am going to give spacemonger a try, but I am not too hopeful, since these space hogging files are missing from Windows itself.

[cranioscopical]

FWIW, when something goes sour here on XP, forcing an ungainly reboot, I sometimes find large files in %temp that Windows can't see but that I can deal with from DOS. The amount that you're missing sounds about right for that.

[icekin]

I've tried the reboot, no use, it only freed up a further 1GB. I still don't know where 12GB went. I have not narrowed it down to a suspect: Rollback Rx.

I tried changing a setting in the program to prevent it from taking snapshots of some of the drives. I remember opening Rollback and under the snapshot history, it had a proposed snapshot of 16,000 MB! I deleted that snapshot right away, but I still have not got my space back. I'm thinking of uninstalling rollback, but unfortunately, I need the snapshots. Does anyone know where the snapshots themselves are stored?

[Carol Haynes]

Try running CHKDSK C: /X /R /V from Start Run and when prompted restart your machine.

If that doesn't do it try using a boot time defrag utility (such as PerfectDisk). You can often lose space on a disc when parts of the disc are incorrectly marked as in use in the FAT. CHKDSK and a boot time defrag should sort it out (hopefully).

[Ampa]

Have you tried looking at the drive with a partition manager? It could be that, for some reason, the partition size has been truncated.

Perhaps not - but it is another angle to try

[icekin]

Thanks everyone, I found the culprit. It was Rollback Rx as I had suspected. For those who are interested to know why and how this happened, read on.

Firstly, I should mention that till this incident occured, I greatly enjoyed using Rollback Rx. I tried FD-ISR, which had some trouble working well on my machine, but Rollback had none of that. Snapshots took up little space and rolling back operations were perfect, it was literally like going back in time before that problem happened. Blows System Restore away.

Problem: Incremental snapshots are supposed to save space by only tracking the parts that have changed on the drive, so being more space efficient in theory. The problem is that Rollback seems to track every change since the last snapshot. There is a way to exclude certain folders, which I used, but still found myself with huge snapshots. The following threads explain in further detail:

1. Rollback Rx Eats Space
2. Rollback Rx Eats Space again
3. Why is my snapshot so big?

In addition, while the threads linked to above and the official FAQ state that deleting a snapshot will recover the space, I found that deleting a 16,000 MB unlocked snapshot did nothing to free my space as claimed.

Solution: The problem was finally solved when I uninstalled Rollback Rx for good. The uninstall happens quickly in Windows, but the immediately subsequent reboot after that uninstall takes over 20 minutes while Rollback erases itself and the snapshots for good. Further reboots are okay.

Conclusion: Despite the powerful features of Rollback, I feel that its too difficult for me to understand and fine tune to my needs. On the other hand, using Rollback has convinced me of the power of Drive Imaging. Its been a life saver for corrupted installs and those driver issues when trying to install and uninstall hardware. I will continue to use Drive Imaging, but will probably try out another program like what's suggested in the DC Backup Guide.

[patteo]

1. Rollback Rx Eats Space
2. Rollback Rx Eats Space again
3. Why is my snapshot so big?

-icekin (April 27, 2008, 03:48 AM)

There's a discount of 65% for a price of $24.15 today.

But unfortunately the above links about it eating up space are dead as I was wondering about that issue.

Could not find the links on that their site with Google.

"RollBack Rx
A Virtual Time-Machine!
RollBack Rx
Tools & Utilities

*** Due to the overwhelming response Horizon DataSys Corporation has agreed to extend this deal for another day - Enjoy! ***

RollBack Rx is a powerful utility that enables home users and IT professionals alike to easily restore their PC to exactly how it was at a specific time before a system crash or other catastrophe.

Sounds pretty good, doesn't it?"
http://www.bitsdujou...ack-rx-professional/

[J-Mac]

No, doesn’t sound good at all to me. HorizonData is one poor company. I purchase FD-ISR about 2 yrs ago and also their "Gold" support plan. Three separate support tickets submitted and they never responded to one of them. Their forum is filled with others who have had similar issues, or at least it was; it seems that posts, threads, and sometimes whole subforums disappear when comments are going what they consider "the wrong way".

I say keep away from this outfit.

Jim

[mcurran]

No, doesn’t sound good at all to me. HorizonData is one poor company. I purchase FD-ISR about 2 yrs ago and also their "Gold" support plan. Three separate support tickets submitted and they never responded to one of them. Their forum is filled with others who have had similar issues, or at least it was; it seems that posts, threads, and sometimes whole subforums disappear when comments are going what they consider "the wrong way".

I say keep away from this outfit.

Jim

-J-Mac (July 18, 2010, 12:44 AM)

Thanks very much, Jim! You've saved me money and time (I had spotted the weirdness re defragging and figured I'd have to investigate). What do you use instead?

-- Maureen

[J-Mac]

Hi Maureen.

Now I just keep very good and up-to-date backups and also regular disk images with Acronis. BTW I also tried Returnil but it - like most similar apps - take up so much room on my HDD that I eventually give up on them. I have an 80GB SATA drive that the Windows system is installed on and two other internal drives with 500GB each, not to mention external drives. Unfortunately this type of app must keep its partition on the system drive - or so their developers tell me - and that is the smallest drive in my case.

Jim