My C: drive looks very large

[walter]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is about 19
GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder is about 11
GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary stuff??
The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the space
occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

 

[charlie]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is
about 19 GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder
is about 11 GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary
stuff?? The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the
space occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

Normal? Yes, more or less.
Clogged with unnecessary stuff? Don't know about "clogged", but there
usually is a bunch of unnecessary stuff.
The list of what might be there is quite long.
Some programs install stuff automatically on C: unless you override the
defaults. Even then, some parts of an application may end up on C:.
Windows has some cleanup utilities built in, and, naturally there is a
plethora of third party utilities.

 

[Paul]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is
about 19 GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder
is about 11 GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary
stuff?? The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the
space occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

If you've installed SP1, use "Disk Cleanup". Look for
special options to delete stuff in Disk Cleanup. I think when
I measured that, it saved ~500MB or so, at the expense
of eliminating the ability to remove SP1.

It's possible VSS can be tracking file system changes,
and that is part of the space used. Or, something to do
with System Restore and restore points. And stuff like that,
isn't always that easy to research. (You can't safely look
in System Volume Information, where some of that stuff is
hiding.)

Note also, that the OS uses "hard links" for a lot of the
files. A file can be stored in the "Store", as well as the
system folder. There can be two file pointers, and one
set of data pointed to by both of them. This saves space.
And it's all made possible by NTFS.

The only problem with the concept, is the File Explorer has
no provision for "double counting". There is no notation
that says "of the 6GB in this folder, 3GB are shared with
another folder, and if you deleted them, no space would be
saved". You cannot do "accounting" with the File Explorer,
due to the incorrect design of the tool. Only the System
Image gives an accurate size.

When a file is hard linked with multiple folders,
the data space doesn't disappear until the last pointer
to the data is removed. You have to delete, using all
the file pointers, to clean up. So if you're using Explorer,
and note some huge total size for something, then look at
another folder, and add all the numbers together, it can exceed
the claimed total size of the volume. It's easy to scare
yourself that way.

When you make a System Image, that'll give you the true size
of the volume. And that 19GB figure could be the true size.
I think my laptop makes a 26GB image, when I do one.
So you seem to be doing pretty well in that regard.

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the space
occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Treesize Free is the best that I've seen.
<http://www.jam-software.de/treesize_free/>

 

[Char Jackson]

When you make a System Image, that'll give you the true size
of the volume. And that 19GB figure could be the true size.
I think my laptop makes a 26GB image, when I do one.
So you seem to be doing pretty well in that regard.

Look out for compression. It's easy to get a system image that's smaller
than the actual size of the drive volume that it contains.

 

[Paul]

Look out for compression. It's easy to get a system image that's smaller
than the actual size of the drive volume that it contains.

As far as I know, SDCLT (system image) makes uncompressed images.
The file extension is .vhd, and the files open immediately in VPC2007.
Which tells me no tricks are involved.

That's how I access my Win7 laptop files, from my desktop. I use
the (slightly stale) .vhd files. I don't have any room in my
"computer room", to set up the laptop. Too much junk

Lots of other backup tools, support compression. But then,
you'd be running that while you're asleep, as it would take
too long otherwise. Good compression, is just too slow.

Paul

 

[Ghostrider01]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is
about 19 GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder
is about 11 GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary
stuff?? The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the
space occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

Does the image file contain pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys?
These might not have been copied since Windows 7 would be
generating them on startup. They could account for anywhere
between 5 GB to as much as 20 GB or more, depending on the
amount of the installed RAM.

GR

 

[Paul]

Does the image file contain pagefile.sys and hiberfil.sys?
These might not have been copied since Windows 7 would be
generating them on startup. They could account for anywhere
between 5 GB to as much as 20 GB or more, depending on the
amount of the installed RAM.

GR

They are copied.

Here's the .vhd from System Image, as mounted in VPC2007.

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4420/systemimage.gif

The way that works, is that is a Win2K operating system,
where the backup file from System Image appears as a second
disk in the VM. The "Acer (E" is the main partition
from my laptop. And the .vhd file has captured both a
hiberfil.sys and a pagefile.sys.

Paul

 

[Paul]

They are copied.

Here's the .vhd from System Image, as mounted in VPC2007.

http://img687.imageshack.us/img687/4420/systemimage.gif

The way that works, is that is a Win2K operating system,
where the backup file from System Image appears as a second
disk in the VM. The "Acer (E" is the main partition
from my laptop. And the .vhd file has captured both a
hiberfil.sys and a pagefile.sys.

Paul

Another thing I can run there, is the Sequoiaview program,
which shows the contents of the partition as blocks. And
I notice I left the Windows 8 installer on the laptop
That's one hog, in the lower left corner of the display,
I can remove the next time the laptop is running. The
pagefile and hiberfile are in the upper right of the image.

http://img831.imageshack.us/img831/8522/hogs.gif

Paul

 

[Char Jackson]

As far as I know, SDCLT (system image) makes uncompressed images.
The file extension is .vhd, and the files open immediately in VPC2007.
Which tells me no tricks are involved.

I'm not familiar with that specific tool, but Acronis has compression levels
labeled None, Normal, High and Max. The default is Normal, which produces an
image somewhat smaller than the raw files would suggest. Access time is
unaffected, but I'd expect that regardless of the compression level.

That's how I access my Win7 laptop files, from my desktop. I use
the (slightly stale) .vhd files. I don't have any room in my
"computer room", to set up the laptop. Too much junk

Understood. I use Remote Desktop.

Lots of other backup tools, support compression. But then,
you'd be running that while you're asleep, as it would take
too long otherwise. Good compression, is just too slow.

I schedule some backup jobs during the night so that they get done when the
system is otherwise quiet, not because of the time needed for the job.
Compression doesn't affect the time very much at all.

 

[slate_leeper]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is about 19
GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder is about 11
GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary stuff??
The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the space
occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

Depending on security settings, "My Computer" may show the System
Volume Information folder as containing zero bytes. Among other
things, this folder actually contains the system restore information,
which can be quite large.

My image software (Seagate DiskWizard) does save all these in the
image, but the version of Norton Ghost I used previously did not.
Perhaps WIndows Backup does not.

-dan z-




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[jetjock]

According to my "My Computer", my C: drive for Win 7/32 holds 33 GB of
programs, drivers and the OS. All of my data. such as music, images and
videos, are on a second drive.

If I make a windows 7 image of the C: Drive, the resulting image is about 19
GB and the image takes about 10 minutes. The "Windows" folder is about 11
GB.

Does this look normal or is my c: drive clogged up with unnecessary stuff??
The computer seems to be working very well and fast.

Is there a program that will give me a breakdown, by folder, of the space
occupied by installed programs and the operating system?

Thank you

Try Wiztree or Wiztree portable.

The former at: http://www.snapfiles.com/get/wiztree.html

The latter at:
http://download.cnet.com/WizTree-Portable/3000-2248_4-75813499.html
if you want to run it from a thumb drive.