Windows 10: D drive full, only used about 20G, large system volume information

Hi there.I am aware that the full d drive has been a known issue with windows for a very long but it just keeps occurring on my device. I keep seeing the free space on my d drive change from 20g to 40g while I've only really used about 20g of its memory space, so very frustrating. same problem with my c drive tooIt is now occurring again so I used spacesniffer to see what took so much space, and it turned out to be the 'system volume information' folder, which is about 100g. I looked up many answers and they say that's the system recovery file which isn't supposed to be showing on your drive

:)

 

System Volume Information contains redundant historical "System Volume Information" files using 80% of my disk

Hi,

There are different options available in the Windows 10 operating system that allow you to manage the disk drives on your computer. This includes formatting disk drives or cleaning up junk files.
The system volume information folder contains the system restore point entries,
data used by the content indexing service databases that speed up your file searches, the volume shadow copy service for backups, and the distributed link tracking service databases used to repair shortcuts and links.

Usually, it is not recommended to delete the entries from the System volume information since Windows needs this files. For us to resolve your concern, kindly attempt the steps below to shrink the size of the System Volume Information
folder:

• Press the Windows key + x to open the Quick link menu and from the list select
  Control panel.
• Select System and Security and then from the options presented choose
  System.
• On the left had the panel of the System information window, select the option
  System protection.
• Once you have the System properties window open, select the
  System protection tab and then click on the button labeled configure.
• You can now control how much disk space Windows uses for System Restore points.

Once you complete the steps you can now attempt to delete the folder and check if this improves the storage space you have on the disk drives.

We look forward to your response once you complete the steps.

 

Remove System Volume information folder from external drive

I have currently found out that System Volume information folder on my external HDD takes around 124GB of space. Hence I decided to delete it to free up some additional space. But for now everything what I have tried did not succeeded.

IMPORTANT:

• External hard drive has 1TB capacity and was previously used for backups and creating restore images (not anymore).
  
• It's connected via USB 3.0 port.
  
• System protected files are displayed.
  
• All operations are performed on the clean install of Windows 10 Pro x64.
  
• Formatted in NTFS
  
• I only have one 1TB drive so moving files to another drive will not be an option.
  

So, what I have tried for now:

All the instructions provided here, meaning:

1. takeown /f "F:\System Volume information" /a /r /d y
   
2. icacls "F:\System Volume information" /t /c /grant administrators:F System:F everyone:F
   ("Are you sure?") y
   
3. rd /s /q "F:\System Volume information"
   

This only helped me to delete one of the folders with a bunch of .db files in System Volume information folder. And I get Access denied as previously.

What I also thought of is to create a separate partition on this drive and move all the files there then format the partition with System Volume information and merge partitions back. This did not work quite well as creating new partition also created a System Volume information folder. And it took quite a while to do the partitioning.

I have gone though following posts:

How to delete "System Volume Information" folder from external drives?

How to delete a folder from external drives if names are too long (like System Volume Information/content...)?

Any suggestions guys?

NOTICE: I don't want to use third party software like Unlocker, Eraser or anything similar to these two. There should be a legit way to get rid of the files in Windows without third party software.

 

System Volume Information contains redundant historical "System Volume Information" files using 80% of my disk

Hi Jordan Dom

The worm turns....

I carried out the Properties method listed above on my drive/partition G: (windows 10 backup drive) there was a 30 second (ish) delay before I could close the clean up window, NO PROGESS BAR or indication something was happening.

I then tried it on my drive/partition E: no delay.

No change to the file explorer window, (this PC) it still shows the drive nearly full.

I then tried the same system file clean up as above, TO THE PROBLEM DRIVE D: no delays to the clean up window, then I noticed the disc in the window showing space usage had dropped to only 62gb, but the main (this PC) file explorer screen still shows the
drive/partition is nearly full. ?????

I closed and reopened the file explorer it now shows only 62gb used ???

I am confused, who (which drive) owned the SVI files on drive D: ??

SVI file now show as follows on CCleaner analyse disk D: shown below... THE PROBLEM FILES ARE GONE

WPSettings.dat D:\System Volume Information\ dat 0.01 KB Other Files 16/10/2016 15:28:44

tracking.log D:\System Volume Information\ log 20.0 KB Other Files 16/10/2016 15:44:06

Wcifs.md D:\System Volume Information\ md 0.00 KB Other Files 31/08/2017 18:21:38

klmeta.dat D:\System Volume Information\ dat 208 KB Other Files 31/08/2017 18:19:17

{ea2f605a-926a-11e7-8967-a402b92ce907}{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046e6cc752} D:\System Volume Information\ 2,293,760 KB Other Files 06/09/2017 14:37:52

{2504c26f-908a-11e7-8967-a402b92ce907}{3808876b-c176-4e48-b7ae-04046e6cc752} D:\System Volume Information\ 0.21 KB Other Files 03/09/2017 18:38:18

WPAppSettings.dat D:\System Volume Information\ dat 0.02 KB Other Files 26/10/2016 14:18:36

What advice can we give to others with this problem.

I will look at my other PC's to see what happens there.

Regards Chris