There are a couple things that most often contribute to
this. The first is a bloated, oversized $TOPS file. You can set your system
to specify that the Transaction Resource Manager will clean the transactional
metadata on the next mount, or reboot.
To do this, start and elevated or administrative command
prompt and run the following command
fsutil resource setautoreset true c:\
The second thing is shadow copies, which can use up a lot of disk space. This option can be used on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003/2003 R2 as well. To see how much space is
being used by shadow copies, you can run the following command from an elevated
command prompt
vssadmin list shadowstorage
For each volume that has shadow copies enabled, it will
display the:
1.
Used Shadow Copy Storage space
2.
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space
3.
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space
You can delete the shadow copies using the “vssadmin delete
shadows /all” command from the command prompt, but they will probably
accumulate rather quickly if you don’t set a new max limit on the shadow copy
storage. There are a few parts to this
command. The /For flag specifies the drive that’s using the shadow storage. The
/On flag specifies the drive where the shadow storage exists. Finally, the
/MaxSize flag specifies the new limit for shadow copy storage, which can be
specified in KB, MB, GB, TB, PB, EB or a percentage. Below are a couple
examples.
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=D: /MaxSize=2GB
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=10%
