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Question

Around 12-15 gb of decrease in Drive C after system restore

Sep 11, 2017 12:46AM PDT

Yesterday I was facing some problem with my computer with windows 10 home and so I decided to perform a system restore which i had created a few days back ago. After starting system restore and allowing it for almost an hour, the laptop screen was still showing initializing system restore. So i forcefully shutdown my laptop and started it again. After starting i got a message that system restore not successful. After that when i went and check the free disk space of system volume C it got decrease by around 12-15 gb. I went and deleted all previous restore point, clean up disk space and also using 3rd party software tried cleaning disk space but still have not recovered this 12-15 gb space. 

After that i went to setting and check the storage as to where this space has been occupied. It is showing that in others around 18 gb has been allocated, for which the windows is showing " There are some of the largest folders we couldn't characterize" (Screenshot attached).

Please help me recover this space.
Thank you

Discussion is locked

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Answer
Re: space
Sep 11, 2017 2:59AM PDT
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Re Space
Sep 11, 2017 6:38AM PDT

I tried treesize and it is showing

System volume information has 12 Gb allocated out of which 11.5 GB allocated for System Restore, sytem app folder.

So now i came to know where my free space went too. But the problem is how to delete it?

By CCcleaner, Disk cleaner, clean manager or by deleting system restore point i am not getting to to delete this specific system restore file. They are all deleting every other file except this 11.5 gb restore files.

Using treesize when i right click on the specif folder and delete, it is showing deleting file and moving it to recycle bin. But when i check recycle bin there is no file, the size of c drive has not increased and again when i running treesize it is showing same 11.5 gb space.

It is probably due to unaccesibility of system volume folder.

I tried app called take ownership and gave myself access to the folder but then when went and tried to open the system volume folder, It showed messaged that i dont have access to folder.

Any other option left? Any suggestions?

I Dont want to boot to linux as i am not an computer expert and would mess up.

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Re: system restore
Sep 11, 2017 6:52AM PDT
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Re: System restore
Sep 11, 2017 7:06AM PDT

I tried it. Its not working.

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Answer
Non computer experts found the Linux boot easy.
Sep 11, 2017 7:24AM PDT

Read my advice on that from a few years ago at http://tips.oncomputers.info/archives2004/0401/2004-Jan-11.htm

Today the only struggle I see for folk that do this is to make the media and then get it to boot. After that they don't talk to me that Linux is hard to use in respect to looking around the HDD and folders.

Anyhow, if it is system restore space, turn it off and reboot. Then see if it's still off and then turn it back on.

If it didn't clean up, there's something else going on and BEFORE YOU DO MUCH ELSE, you must be ready for a total melt down. That is, PCs, Smart Phones, Tablets and such can not be trusted to save your files. Backup is not optional and we only lose what we didn't backup.

I have to write that because there are new folk that don't believe or just were never aware.

OK. Next up would be me heading to the command line but some folk never learned the 3 to 5 command lines to save them from the repair or support counters. It's not that hard and a survival skill that folk should not go without.

-> So one last idea is to be sure the file system is OK. While I would have done the following and now be booting Linux or using the command line to look around and delete, I can't know if you did the usual CHKDSK /F/R/X. Here's an article on that.
https://www.tekrevue.com/tip/fix-hard-drives-chkdsk-windows-10/