Vista: I suddenly lost a lot of disk space

I have a Dell XPS M1710 laptop with a 160GB hard drive.  The other day, I clicked on the Computer node under Windows Explorer and saw that out of 160GB I had a mere 30 and change left. 

Interesting.

The first thing that crossed my mind was the fact that a) I had two virtual machines each using 20GB of disk space and that b) I have ripped a few CD’s so I can listen to them on media player and let us not forget c) I have installed the latest Visual Studio.  I was just about to dismiss the whole thing and make a mental note to delete some old stuff later on when a thought occurred to me: I should still have more space than that! 

After some investigating, I couldn’t think of a single thing or group of things that took up that much space.  I was just about to give up when I decided to try running the disk clean up.  I accepted all the default values and waiting a few minutes while disk cleanup did it’s thing.  After finishing with disk cleanup, I checked my drive C and noticed that disk cleanup had indeed freed some space but did not return near the amount of space I thought I should have.  I decided to give disk cleanup another shot, but this time I was going to check out some of the more advanced features.  So I clicked on the more options tab, and low and behold the solution slapped me right in the face.  Here is the screen shot:

Remember, Vista included the volume shadow copy service for creating shadow copies that you could only get by being a member of a domain under Windows XP – and it is turned on by default.  A quick check of how many shadow copies I had confirmed my suspicions:

So I elected to delete all but the most recent and I am now happy to report that I have a full 80GB free instead of the 30GB or so I had earlier which is right in line with what I thought I should have.

So remember, run disk cleanup on your Vista machine and don’t forget to check out the More Options tab.  I do NOT, however, recommend turning off Shadow copies.  Being able to go back in time to get an old copy of an Excel spreadsheet because you screwed up the copy you have now is just to cool.

JamesNT