Hard drive space fluctating

[Fr]anc[is]

A week or two ago I had ~20GB free, and then I installed a vista service pack update, and when it was done my free space had jumped up to 80GB. I go WTF and check to make sure everything was still there, it seemed so. I restarted and ran all my scans, nothing bad and it stayed at 80. But I've been watching it, and it's been going back down, a few GB at a time, now I'm at 60GB and I don't know what's going on. If it was just a few GB I would have assumed it was just cleaning up old updates presumably in the service pack, but 60GB is bigger than the whole operating system. And there is no way I've used 20GB in a week. Help?

 

[Reed Spacer]

Is your system restore on? That can use up a lot of disk space, especially if it's set to a high percentage.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

It was, and set to 26GB! That's like 3 or 4 innocent games I had to uninstall. Cleaning up those got me back the 20GB, and I set it to something more reasonable. Still not sure why I got back all that space originally, but I learned something tonight, thanks.

 

[Reed Spacer]

anc[is]It was, and set to 26GB! That's like 3 or 4 innocent games I had to uninstall. Cleaning up those got me back the 20GB, and I set it to something more reasonable. Still not sure why I got back all that space originally, but I learned something tonight, thanks.

Set it as low as you can; realistically, if you're going to roll back your hard drive it's likely going to be to the previous save, so you really only need a few gigs. I have mine set to one percent. Of course, I have a terabyte drive, so one percent is almost 10 gigs, but still...

 

[Antari]

Its very possible that the updated service pack re-wrote your swap file. It can get fairly sizeable.