How-To Geek

I have 2 partitions on a 320 GB hard drive. 1 which holds my OS has 250 GB and the second which is 50 GB holds my backup (I know, seems you always get less than you're supposed to). Anyway my OS drive is showing that I have only 126 GB, but when I go into the drive select all of the folders and look at the properties it says I have used only 85 GB. So if all the folders and files in the drive only total 85 why do the drive properties show one 123 GB used?

My idea was the deleted files that don't completely remove, and recuva confirms there are a lot of them. But I can't find a program to remove the ones already removed from the recycled bin so I can try this.

Any ideas?

I use my comp a lot but I'm green in these technical matters :)

I am not quite sure I understand all your nums (will ask for more detail later) but here are a few things to consider.
1. The capacity that is advertised (e.g. 320GB) is a decimal number. What you see in the PC is a binary number - it differs in such that 1000 bytes in decimal equals 1024 bytes in binary. So your binary GB's are only about 95% of your decimal GB's (e.g. 320GB/1024/1024/1024)
2. The OS grabs a good chunk of shadowstorage that you usually do not see. If you want to see it, do the following: Go to ALL PROGRAMS > Accessories > Command Prompt > right click and OPEN as Administrator. Into the little black window type : vssadmin list shadowstorage. It will show you the shadowstorage for all your physical and logical disks. The interesting number is the "Maximum shadowstorage copy space". That is the chunk that was reserved by the system. It normally can be reduced significantly. If you want to do that, let us know and give us the numbers you see in Command Prompt.
Questions:
1. When you look into COMPUTER (choose`'Tiles' as VIEWS) what do you see as xxxGB free of yyy
2. 50GB free for BACKUP (I assume you mean the Recovery partition) is very odd. Usually it should be in the 10GB range. Give me the xxxGB free of yyy numbers too.
3. Dont worry about the deleted files. They will disappear with your next disk defragmentation automatically. No need for you to do anything.

Yeah, I use a larger partition to backup everything in my PC and I filled dang near all of it. I save a lot of images, e-books etc. and I'd hate to lose them. I should probably burn them but I get carried away with other things. :) Anyway the numbers are as follows:

Used Shadow Copy storage space: 26.017 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy storage space: 27.857 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage: 44.713 GB

I see where it went now, can I free any of it?

P.S Is there a way to use a smaller partition but still back up the files? I know it was over my head but I thought I needed a large partition for recovery.

To Lighthouse: I use CCleaner daily and I have a prog called diskeeper to defrag. Thank you.

Lighthouse, 1. Why would anybody want to backup on the same hard disk? If that crashes, all is gone. 2. Then you suspect the Recovery Partition is within the 250GB's? In any case, between C: and D: and that backup part the nums don't add up for me. I suspect the difference between the 85 and 123 is the shadowtorage. But how big is C: total and D: total (which should be max. 10GB). Let's see whether he can give us some more nums.

@WHS I never thought the hard drive would completely go since I bought it only a few months ago. And (probably over my head just giving my reasoning here) I thought if windows crashed that the other partition should be able to be accessed after a fresh install on the first partition.
I'm sure it makes no sense to you, but I'm no technician. I usually just learn these things from people like you, so I suppose I'll go out and get another drive, eh? Thanks.

Edit: And the size of the 2 partitions together is 297.8 GB (249 OS drive 48.8 GB Recovery)

Your partitoning thinking is correct, except the small one should be C: (boot etc etc), with all your stuff on D: (or whatever your 2nd partition is called)
Your disk size is correct for a 320Gb (after formatting)
I don't have Shadowstorage!

You can reduce the shadowstorage to 5GB or even 3 GB depending how many restore points you want to keep (figure about 1GB per restore point). The exact command is: vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize= 5GB (now that is for the C: disk) -- make sure you put a blank in front of the slashes (/) and that you put GB after the 5 or 3 or whatever num you choose. Only then it knows you are talking GB's, if you forget it, it will assume bytes, and that is really tooo small.

@Lighthouse and whs: That is a normal result for Windows XP. In fact I don't think Windows XP has support for shadow space. Windows XP uses a different way to System Restore points.

@all: I just want to point out that besides System Restore the main feature in Vista that uses shadow space is Previous Versions.
Previous Versions keeps copies of older file versions when a file is changed. The amount of shadow storage also determines how many file versions are kept.
If you have enough hard drive space I would recommend leaving the shadow space alone. It can be helpful to have older files around in case you need them.

Note: It won't replace a normal backup though as if your Windows install gets corrupted your shadow space is lost.

@whs: I had in part assumed that since Vista has Shadow Storage and XP doesn't that Lighthouse must be running Windows XP.
I realize now I made a mistake in wording it that way.
Thinking about it's probably also possible there are other ways for Shadow Space to not be used in Vista.

I was thinking maybe the use of Shadow Space is tied to the System Restore enable setting.
So it's a possible that Lighthouse has Vista and disabled System Restore so that's why there isn't a Shadow Space.
I could be completely wrong though as I can't test this idea at the moment (Don't want to lose Previous Versions if I'm right).