Anyone else lose major GBs after cloning Vista HD? (1 Viewer)

[Carlo_M]

Recently upgraded my 500GB HD to a 1.5TB Seagate HD. Included with the Seagate was a cloning program powered by Acronis (which I have had good luck with in the past). I did a full clone to make a new bootable drive.

When I first cloned my C: drive and then booted to the new drive, first thing I did was right click on the new C: drive and compared it with the now D: (formerly C: ) drive. All was good, I knew the numbers wouldn't be exact but they both roughly said "242GB used" on each drive. That was yesterday, and I left the PC on for most of the day/night just to make sure the new drive was okay.

This morning I booted on, and all seemed fine. However when I right click on my new C: drive, it now says "185GB used"! Right clicking on D: still yielded "242GB used". 57GB gone!

So in a panic I ran all my programs, and looked at much of my data (pics, music, etc.) and everything seemed to be there. I couldn't account for where 57GBs went off to. I clicked on the most important folders (Windows, Program Files, Users) and compared folder sizes. All were comparable between the C: and D: drives.

So I did a weird thing. I went to the top levels of C: and D: (so I could see the entire folder structures of the drives). I have "view hidden files" enabled, so I see the translucent hidden folders as well. I clicked "Select All" on both the C: and D: drives, thus selecting all files folders, including the hidden ones, then right-clicked and selected Properties.

All folders on C: = 176GB
All folders on D: = 175GB


I've installed a new program or two so I can account for the 1GB difference.

But what I want to know is: why is there 9GB of "superhidden" data on my new C: drive (which is the only reason I can account for the 185->176 difference) and more importantly why is there 67GB of "superhidden" data on my D (old C

drive? (242-175)

And why was it there when I first cloned, but is gone from my new C: drive now? Anyone got any clues? I know Vista does some kind of Restore Points and shadow archiving [the HD is almost always running], but could that really be 67GBs of archiving in "superhidden" [ghost?] files? And if so, why would those 67GBs of ghost files be brought over on the initial clone and then disappear within a day?

Maybe an important point: I'm running Vista 32-bit Enterprise edition (kind of like Business edition but given to large institutions whose people work from home, which I do) - perhaps Enterprise does more "hidden backups" because it's designed for corporate use?

 

[Carlo_M]

Answered my own question. Vista's Shadow Copy service. Uses up to 15% of your hard drive for shadow (backup) copies of files, etc. On my old 500GB HD it was using 65GB! On my new one it somehow knew to start over and is only using 2GB (that's a lot considering my new HD is only a day old). 15% of 1.5TB is almost 300GB. I'm going to have to manually reduce the amount of space allowed for shadow copy (there's a command line utility) because there's no way I'm going to allow it to eat up 300GB of my new HD space!

Why couldn't they just get it to work like Time Machine