Windows 10: System Restore was the culprit

OK. May be when you turn off System Restore, it also reset the permission back to default. Just a guess because I never use System Restore.

 

Before I begin with the issue, please do not attempt this if you are not really advanced and know your stuff as I do not want to be responsible for borking your computer....

I was reading on another forum about a user having Macrium backups running on a schedule. He posted a picture of his System Volume Information folder showing there was multiple older VSS Shadow copies still lurking around.

I decided to take a look at mine since I use Macrium. I had to take ownership of the SVI folder to look in there of course. After I gained access and looked, there were quite a few VSS "snapshots" totalling over 11GB to my shock. I did a bit of digging on this and ran this command:

Code: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=2GB[/quote] This reduced the size to just under 2GB. I have since rebooted and see no issues at all. This is not a request for help, but rather to see if anyone else using Macrium can confirm the same. Like I said please do not run any commands or do anything WITHOUT FIRST HAVING A BACKUP and knowing what you are doing.

My main drive is over 9GB lighter now.

EDIT: I was able to tie together the exact date and time of the files in the System Volume Information folder to my logs in Macrium. Exact dates and times. Also upon reboot Windows took permission back of the SVI.

Any ideas, comments?

:)

 

My storage space is getting low mysteriously.

system logs can eat up space. Hibernation file, system restore points and temporary files are common culprits; especially if you perform a lot of downloads.

 

No sound after updates

I should add that when I still had sound this morning I suspected that Office updates might be the culprit so I created a restore point. Unfortunately restoring the system to prior to installing Office did not restore the audio and the Audio Controller
was still banged in Device Manager.

 

Okie dokie, found the cause of the files/size of the folder. Two words lol. SYSTEM RESTORE.

I can only assume Windows was making a restore point every time Macrium ran on my C drive. I disabled System Restore and the size dropped to 700mb in the SVI folder. Hope this can help anyone else wondering where their space is going when doing backups.
*Think

 

Shadow copy is created and store in SVI by backup software and once completed, it should remove it. If you have a bunch of those, that means the backup software did not do a good job cleaning up or the backup failed at some point in the past.

Second, you should not take ownership of SVI, the special permission was set so that even Adminstrator can access it. Change it back does not really behave the same.

To delete all the orphan shadow copy, use: vssadmin delete shadows /all so there's no need to look into SVI.
Nirsoft has a tool for you to explore these shadows:
ShadowCopyView - Shadow copy viewer for Windows 10/8/7/Vista

Use Device Cleanup from: Uwe Sieber's Homepage
to remove the orphan drivers from Device Manager too:

 

It was all System Restore, once I turned it off the size of the folder dropped to 700mb instantly. I thought it was Macrium leaving them in there.

On reboot Windows restored the permissions back the way they were automatically. I cannot even read the folder now. It says "You must have Read permissions to view the properties of this object".

The only reason I looked in there was to see if my SVI looked like another user's did full of large shadowcopy files. I will save the command you posted, thank you for that.

I had noticed my drive was getting smaller and smaller by a couple GB per day recently and could not figure it out. When I saw his post on another forum it got me digging around. All is well now, System Restore is off, I don't have a couple GB disappearing randomly thanks to it.

EDIT: I use WinDirStat to see the size of my disks in details. It breaks it down to the files even. This was why I got into digging into this even deeper. I could not find the folder that was responsible for 11GB of missing space. I could see the date of the last change on folders in WinDirStat and nothing was out of whack for that much space.

 

Sure you can if you click on OK. This is the message you should have seen .:

 

It went back that way right after I rebooted when I last looked after turning off System Restore. Right when I posted the 2nd message in the thread *Smile