Odd disparity between measured and actual amount of data on drive

Factual Questions
1

While I am waiting for our France-based help desk to get around to responding, I thought I’d throw this one out for ideas.

Our local company office has a server with a very large-capacity hard disk drive that is broken down into smaller virtual drives, each of which is formatted via NTFS. At least two of these virtual drives are showing as being at capacity, or nearly so, even though it appears that the actual amount of data on them is nowhere near the amount reported. For example, using the Windows XP ‘Properties’ function, the virtual drive \USERS, nominally 126 Gb, shows 114 Gb used, 12.8 available. I took the trouble, however, to go through each of the top-level directories and add up all the data in them (plus subdirectories) and only came up with roughly 46.5 Gb. There are apparently no uncounted temporary or hidden files that I might have missed. Anyone know what might be going on here?

2

You could try using TreeSize Free. It is a free utility that will show directory and file usage.

Also, you say the drive is broken into smaller virtual drives. What exactly do you mean by this? Are you creating multiple partitions on the drive or some other method?

3

Definitely get something that will analyze the file structure and show you what’s going on that you can’t see.

I had a problem like this a while back with my Ubuntu computer. The drive was saying it was full with less than 75% of its rated capacity worth of files on it. Turned out that when I accessed it remotely and deleted files, those deleted files went into a trash folder that did not get emptied by the normal “Empty Trash” procedure. A Linux disk analyzer similar to the above-recommended TreeSize saved my sanity.

4

Assuming that the server is a Windows server, there may be previous versions of files. Further, there may be Volume Shadow files, left over from backups.

Edit: forgot the obvious - you may not have sufficient security rights to see all the files.

5

Good catch, worth checking.

6

Right, multiple partitions. That’s what I meant to say.

Maybe, but I was under the impression that I would be blocked at the directory level, not individual files.

Anyway, some useful ideas here. If our crack help desk hasn’t, er, helped by tomorrow, I’ll investigate further.

7

So… What was the culprit?

8

I am also curious.