Windows 10: System volume information is taking up 36% of my drive. I don't have any system restore...

submitted by /u/sierratrading
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:)

 

Stop system volume information appearing on pen drives.

Hi Lee,

Thank you for being a part of Windows 10.

I appreciate you for providing details about the issue and we are happy to help you.

The System Volume Information folder is a hidden system folder that the System Restore tool uses to store its information and restore points.

You can prevent the system from creating restore points in your Pen drive by following these steps:

• 
  Type system restore in the search bar and select
  Create a restore point.
  
• 
  Enter password if the system prompts.
  
• 
  Select System protection tab and click on the
  Configure button.
  
• 
  Under Restore settings click on
  Disable System protection option.
  

Now that you have disabled the restore points from being created on the Pen drive, you can now take ownership of the system volume information folder and delete it. System volume information folder is a hidden system folder and usually you don’t have
access to it. So, you have to first take ownership of the folder and then delete it. Connect the Pen drive and follow the below steps:

• 
  Press Windows + E from the Keyboard to open the File Explorer.
  
• 
  Select View menu and click on Options drop down.
  
• 
  Click on Change folders and search options.
  
• 
  Select View tab and under Advanced settings click on
  Show hidden files, folders and drives option.
  
• 
  Click on Apply and Ok.
  
• 
  Now, go to the Pen drive and right click on the Volume system information folder and click on
  properties.
  
• 
  Click the Security tab, click Advanced, and then click
  Change.
  
• 
  Type the name of the person you want to give ownership to and click
  Check Names.
  
• 
  The user name that you’re giving ownership to should be display, click
  OK.
  
• 
  If you want that person to be the owner of files and subfolders in this folder, select the
  Replace owner on sub containers and objects check box and click
  OK.
  
• 
  Now, you can delete the folder.
  

Kindly let us know if you need any further assistance with Windows. We are glad to assist you.

Thank you.

 

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,

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.