Comments on: Mysterious Server 2003 disk space consumption

By: Mitja Tomazic

Mitja Tomazic — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 10:22:32 +0000

Thanks! Article helped me on Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. I’m not even sure which program turned on VSS on one of the disks (might be SCVMM, Hype-V Manager, native Windows backup …). It definitely gobbled up half of the disk.

By: Kevin Roe

Kevin Roe — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 05:51:44 +0000

Interesting article. I myself has never been experienced it. Surely, I would re-checking my servers as those all are running with Windows 2003. If you look for bathroom face-lift guide please visit http://www.bathroomaccessoriesset.org.

By: Clay

Clay — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 20:47:34 +0000

Great post. I just had this happen on 2 domain controllers. I used the Sysinternals du.exe tool to figure out the space was being consumed by C:\System Volume Information, and your post helped me figure out it was our nightly backups with Backup Exec causing this.

By: LTS

LTS — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 01:11:50 +0000

It does not adversely impact our backups. It adversely impacts my drive space and causes some unnecessary low disk space alarms. The server has no snapshots enabled, so you’d expect that any information left over would be deleted once the backup is done. This is not the case.

I’ll be able to gauge this impact on my other servers tomorrow once I get in the office again.

By: Joe Glessner

Joe Glessner — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 20:41:56 +0000

BE should only be using the VSS snapshots during actual backups, so it shouldn’t have any adverse effect on your backups.

By: LTS

LTS — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 03:54:35 +0000

TIMELY!

I was just investigating this issue on our Exchange server. It’s not Yosemite backup, we use Symantec BackUp exec and lo and behold there using a nasty 135GB of disk space are snapshots. It seems that Symantec also performs this nasty little trick.

I blew away all the scheduled tasks for the VSS and that immediately blanked the file so I gained back my space. Now to see how Symantec responds to that.

By: Brainwarrior12

Brainwarrior12 — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:26:36 +0000

I ran into the same issue on Vista.

By: Jared

Jared — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 15:43:50 +0000

Joe, Thanks! This is the exact issue I was trying to figure out since I noticed a drop in disk space a few days ago and after installing Acronis as my new backup software. Didn’t even think to check out VSS. Sure enough that was the problem. Great article.