[ecoll39638]

I followed all the instructions and actually lost 1.5GB. Thanks Microsoft. Luckily the update did go smoothly.

[lordmorgul]

The automatic background shadow copies were probably to blame...

I installed Vista Business, then SP1, on a virtual machine on my Macbook. The installed virtual machine harddrive was using only 8 Gb the first week. The second week it was using 12 Gb (note I didn't install or create anything large at all). The third week it was using nearly 20 GB. This is caused by making copies of files, not by left-over files from the installation. I uninstalled it and returned to XP soon after.



The problem is that Vista assumes all your currently 'free' disk space is better used by making your disk work almost constantly shuffling around copies of your files. This will wear out the harddrive faster, especially on a laptop drive, and should be unnecessary if you have a well chosen backup method of your own. If you don't, you're screwed if that drive dies... which MS is making more likely with all this unnecessary file copying.



You can be a happy Vista customer if you want. I'll still be frustrated with MS for doing something so idiotic.

[WiscoKid]

My desktop computer is running Vista Service Home Premium with SP1. I was about to install SP2 and it said it was a 343.9 MB file and would take an hour or more.. Apparently that was for those who never did regular updates and/or are on dial-up. Before the installation, my 500 GB hard drive had 339 GB free disk space. After the install, I had a 55 GB increase. Even on miy notebook running Vista Basic with a 60 GB HDD with 43 GB free, it increased by 14 GB. I had wondered why this happened and am glad I came upon this story. I have NOT noticed an speed improvement, however.

[squishie]

After reading your article, went to MS update and there it was. So I shut-down anti-virus and all other screens and hit download. (Big file, 561MB).Then just watched the screen. From download to install, the only time it asked me to do something was to accept the license and hit install. It did the rest, including restart (twice). One screen told me it would take a little over a hour to install, It took under 20 minutes. I had no problems at all with this update. Oh this is a 64bit system.(HP a6642p). I forgot to look at disk space before install. I think I gained quite a bit but can't swear to it. Now I got to find or figure out what has changed. Good luck to the rest of you...

[maddogjohn]

I picked up 40 Gbs with SP2 running 2-150 gig hard drives in Raio 0 configuration. Strange

[smax013]

lordmorgul said:

The automatic background shadow copies were probably to blame...


I installed Vista Business, then SP1, on a virtual machine on my Macbook. The installed virtual machine harddrive was using only 8 Gb the first week. The second week it was using 12 Gb (note I didn't install or create anything large at all). The third week it was using nearly 20 GB. This is caused by making copies of files, not by left-over files from the installation. I uninstalled it and returned to XP soon after.





The problem is that Vista assumes all your currently 'free' disk space is better used by making your disk work almost constantly shuffling around copies of your files. This will wear out the harddrive faster, especially on a laptop drive, and should be unnecessary if you have a well chosen backup method of your own. If you don't, you're screwed if that drive dies... which MS is making more likely with all this unnecessary file copying.





You can be a happy Vista customer if you want. I'll still be frustrated with MS for doing something so idiotic.

And as I understand it, you cannot turn off Shadow Copy seperate from System Restore.

[rasmasyean]

I thought it was just some cache that got reset and cleaned up. I was expecting it to fill back up eventually.

[Flashorn]

Smax !!



This service (shadow copy) is only available in Vista Ultimate, Enterprise and Business.

Vista Home Premium users are out of luck or maybe not. And , you're right , it is always on

with no Off switch.



FLASHORN.

[thogul5908]

I have not noticed an increase yet.But the software seems to be more responsive less hanging.

I have vista premium

[gorufu]

Are you saying that my Vista Home Premium is eating up /wearing out my hard drive by contiuously making shadow copies which are not accessible until I upgrade to Vista Ultimate?

[Zakane]

I got on today - saw it was under windows update. I updated with no issues. I have two Hitachi drivers Raid 0 for a total of 640gigs- and gain what appears to be around 10-20 gigs of space back after installing service pack 2 - so far no issues have came up and the system does feel more responsive like someone was stating above.

[lordmorgul]

No, if you're running Home then the shadow copy service will not be present, so it will not be doing anything to your hard drive. If you are running a version that includes it then it will be making many file read and writes that are not strictly 'necessary', thereby decreasing the lifespan of the drive. The blocks on a magnetic drive can only be written to a certain number of times before they start to fail; this number depends on many things and is a statistical guess (mean time to failure), so some drives fail earlier and some fail later. The point is, keeping a drive active and writing files significantly more often while the computer is running has an effect on its reliability (somewhat like a 'torture test' where you would write and read files 24 hours a day until it fails, which it is eventually guaranteed to do).

[smax013]

lordmorgul said:

No, if you're running Home then the shadow copy service will not be present, so it will not be doing anything to your hard drive.

From what I understand, this is NOT true. The service that actually does the shadow copying IS present and functioning in Vista Home Basic and Home Premium. You just cannot access the "shadow copies" in Vista Home Basic or Vista Home Premium.

http://www.mydigital...shadowexplorer/

There is a program that you can use in Home Premium and Home Basic to access the "shadow copies". It is called Shadow Explorer:

http://www.shadowexplorer.com/

[doah78]

I don't believe that it is giving disk space back. What is most likely happening is it is clearing out the volume shadow copy, which is vista is basically the system restore but better. The default system restore is i believe set at 12ish% of the hard disk so the bigger your hard drive is the more stuff the volume shadow copy can take up. The best thing I have found to do is to create a scheduled task to do a disk cleanup every couple of weeks which will release a lot of free disk space. Also you can fix the volume shadow copy to not take up so much disk space. On my 140gb raid array it was take up around 25gb I used Vssadmin, which is a command line utility to control the volume shadow copy software, and i reduced the amount of space volume shadow copy can take up. Volume shadow copy is a nice utility so I could not recommend disabling it all together. If you right click on a folder it gives you the option to go back to previous versions of a folder, macs would call this time machine, vss just doesn't have the pretty interface.

[rasmasyean]

For me, it freed up space, but I checked today and I lost 10GB back into limbo. I don't think it's a feature of SP2. It's just some caching that people have been talking about. I'm using ultimate.

[lordmorgul]

Oh wow, thanks for clarifying smax. That is even more idiotic than I first thought... making shadow copies you cannot even utilize is adding wear to your disks for nothing.

[rasmasyean]

How old is your hard drive? 7 years? Reliability has improved dramatically but you should still back up...at least important stuff.
Under most normal circumstances, a hard drive's useful life is limited by size, speed, etc. before it "wears out"...unless you're doing something special with it like a full time torrent machine.

Anyways, you can turn it off if you want to. There should be setting somewhere.

[gorufu]

The 01 DEC 07 PC Advisor (pcadvisor.co.uk) indicates that VISTA Home Premium (and Home Basic) does indeed make shadow copies but won't allow recovery. Saving this data anyway "is wasting CPU cycles and disk space" (OUCH!). They give a procedure to turn off the shadow feature of VISTA HP, but I suspect you'll lose the system restore feature as well. This shadowing without letting you recover data by VISTA HP seems inefficient, senseless and, well, almost diabolical (!) by microsoft. I'm not such a very happy VISTA user anymore!

[lordmorgul]

Reliability of hard drives will decrease just as dramatically if developers continue to do such foolish things to increase the demands made on the disk. It is well known that keeping laptop drives active and not allowing them to sleep can seriously impact both battery performance and drive reliability. Excessive shadow copying (or anything else that keeps the drive awake and writing data) is a very bad thing if it is not serving a purpose... and for most general users shadow copying is not useful (especially if they cannot even access the copies to recover a file change).

[mpheadley]

As far as the temp files, I wonder how many of them were old installations of previous windows myself. Not sure how Vista works, as I have XP, but I remember when they used to rename the old installation windows.old and wondering what the heck I should do with it!