Defraggler, lost HD space

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Thu Aug 29, 2013 11:56 am

Hi,

I defragged both hard drives today in my Win 7 Dell PC, with Defraggler. One drive, "C", the main OS drive, I got 5 or 10 GB more after defragging but the spare drive I lost space. They are both 80 GB HDs. I recently reduced many photo files by resizing them, and was expecting to gain space after defrag, not lose space.

Any ideas on why this happened and what I can do to regain space?

Thank you.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Thu Aug 29, 2013 12:59 pm

Defragging does not create/free/delete any free space. A byproduct of the defrag might have been purchasing of some VSS snapshots that may have been corrupted, and your OS discarded them. Not sure about the second partition...perhaps defragging changes files enough to kick in some more VSS snapshots.

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Thu Aug 29, 2013 2:28 pm

Hi,

Do you think Windows Defrag is better to use than Defraggler?

After I did this I downloaded a Duplicate File Finder and ran it and recovered over 1 GB in the spare drive. I had about 1990 duplicates.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 7:10 am

I think as a defrag program, defraggler is probably better than the native one as far as doing a good job on a severely fragmented HDD. However....manual defrag is not as important as it was back in the pre Windows XP days. It was important in the Win9X days, in the days of FAT file systems. It's less important on NTFS file systems. It became less important starting with Windows XP and how it self maintained itself. Even less important with vista, even less important with Win7...as it auto defrags during hours of non use.

Easto · Post by **Easto** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 8:56 am

I'm running Win 7 and I don't think I've ever defragged my HDD

CableDude · Post by **CableDude** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 12:48 pm

Easto wrote:I'm running Win 7 and I don't think I've ever defragged my HDD

Took me about 12 hours on Christmas day.

Lurch · Post by **Lurch** » Fri Aug 30, 2013 5:50 pm

On older systems than XP, I used to end up with 0 fragmented files after a defrag but now I don't seem to. I end up with many fragmented files.

I reclaimed the spare HD space. After defragging "D" yesterday, I lost space and wound up with only 34.9 GB free of 149 GB. I only had less than 16 GB of files on there, so how it turned into over 100 GB is beyond me.
So, I put it all on my 16 GB flash drive and then formatted "D", then I had 148 of 149 GB free. I moved the 9.86 GB of files back onto "D", and now I have 135 GB free of 149 GB.

What happened to "D" and is there anything I can do to prevent this from happening again? I knew I couldn't have actually used up 100 GB of space. I only take a few pics nowadays.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Sat Aug 31, 2013 9:22 am

I'm at a loss...only thing I can think of Shadow Copy files (previous versions) are coming into play.

YARDofSTUF · Post by **YARDofSTUF** » Mon Sep 02, 2013 11:28 am

http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=31045

Post #4, Scat is right, shadow copy is the culprit.