Shadow Storage

[Africord]

I have an A6460T desktop with a 500GB diskdrive. Today, we started getting warnings about running out of disk space. I determine that we shouldn't have much over 100 GB used on the drive, I run a "vssadmin" command and learn the following:

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.621 GB

Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 11.864 GB

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: UNBOUNDED

Afterwards, I delete all but the last restore point at set the storage maximum to 50GB.  I recovered over 300GB as a result. 

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 8.559 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 10.888 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 50 GB

Any idea why this was set "unbounded" before?  Did this happen during the warrantee work?

[Bill_Hicks]

It sounds like you were running backups to your D: Drive which is a recovery partition and not supposed to be used as storage.

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=bph07122&lc=en&dlc=en&cc=us&lang=en&rule=10238&p...

[Africord]

Actually, no.  I use Carbonite for my backups and only have the C drive identified for backup.  I cannot explain what caused that many shadow copies.  However, I couldn't believe that the storage for such activity was left UNBOUNDED.  Clearly this is configurable and should have been set to a reasonable amount when Vista was installed.  The only other system level add on is Norton 360.

[Mister_Do]

Hi Africord,

I don't know for sure what is happening, but it could be related to how Vista and your backup software are dealing with shadow volumes. Take a look at this site and see if it helps:

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/diskspacev.html

[Africord]

In my original message, I documented the before and after changes when I adjusted the shadow storage.  My entire point was that something needs to be done about the way Vista was configured at HP.  Not sure how to get that message back to customer service.  But I can't believe they ignore these forums completely.