Run the following PS command:ĭeduplication isn't a compression method. When you delete a file, the space won't be recovered immediately. Reading the rest of the thread, you need a more aggressive garbage collection policy on your deduplicated volume. It's worth mentioning that some of the tree sizing programs don't work properly on deduped volumes - There was a modified version of WinDirStat which enumerates duplicated disk space properly called WinDirStatDD If anything, the extra overhead of the additional compression format will make files larger. You generally can't compress that that's already been compressed. Now, if you're enabling traditional on-the-fly compression on a folder and/or file system then yes, what you've said is right. That said, most file systems do this at the block level rather than the file level these days. Therefore, it doesn't matter whether a file is compressed or not, if there are 500 duplicates of a jpg file, the other 499 will still be removed and the space will be recovered. So if someone puts on a file called "Super fun happy time.jpg" and then copies it 500 times, the 499 duplicates are removed and replaced with a pointer to the original file instead. Deduplication removes duplicate copies of data on a storage device. Just seen your edit, yes, you would need an extra 1.92tb on that drive to store everything without deduplication.Deduplication isn't a compression method. The size on disk will give you how much space is used on the disk, whereas using the regular size and temporarily excluding the dedup will give you the actual data size. Treesize doesn't understand dedupe, which is why you get bad readings. It is very common to use on storage servers, but if you have a lot of files that are already compressed, like videos and photos, then you can end up using more space.
dedupe is short for deduplication, and is essentially a compression method. My question is - how do I delete these files? Is it possible to clean up these files without breaking the current snapshots?ĭedupe is not a part of VSS. Research suggests this is where the VSS copies live - but looking at the files, a lot of them are super old, dating as far back as 2015! I believe this is where our space is being consumed - all these old files that haven't been deleted. Expanding the folders leads me to 1.8TB in E:\System Volume Information\Dedup. It's a 2TB drive within Vmware, so I don't understand how it's reporting 6TB. It says that the E:\ drive is size 5.9TB with 1.9TB allocated. I used Tree Size (run as Administrator) and I'm confused by it's readings.
This led me to question VSS, but looking at it, it's currently only using 33GB of space (presumably because the drive is >90% full). This was about 300GB and after deleting it, I saw no dent in the used space. I also deleted the archived home folders of staff who left, since they're backed up to our long term storage. At first, I thought someone had dumped their removable drive as a backup, or duplicated a large folder to the home drive. You may be prompted by UAC – if so, click Yes.We've been slowly eating away at our staff file server's data drive and I'm perplexed as to why. Press “Ctrl + Shift + Enter” to open a command prompt as Administrator.
To remove the oldest shadow copiesĬlick the Windows (or Start) button and type cmd into the search box. There are essentially two options for reclaiming this space from the shadow copy void – you can choose to remove all restore points, or you can keep the newer ones and remove only the oldest restore points. For example, on one of my RAID drives, system protection is set to use up to 1% of the drive, but that actually equates to an astounding 37GB! Indeed, you potentially stand to gain many gigabytes of space depending on your settings. If your system is working perfectly and you feel like freeing up some space, it might be time to take the plunge and wipe the shadow copy slate clean. The net effect of all of these “backups” is redundancy but less available drive space. Depending on your settings, Windows may also keep copies of files like your documents or pictures, which you can roll back to earlier versions.
Should something stop working, you then have the option to roll back the changes to one of these snapshots using system restore.
When you install new software, run patch updates or setup new devices, Windows may automatically create a system snapshot before making changes to the system.