I have an issue that hard drive space appears to be going missing on my Windows Server 2012 R2 DataCentre virtual machine running Exchange 2016 CU5.
By "missing" I mean that the amount of free space as reported by explorer for the drive (20.1Gb) is wildly different from the value I get by taking total hard drive size (169Gb) minus space apparently consumed by files (81.1Gb per WinDirStat running locally as Administrator or 86.1Gb per ncdu running remotely, connected to c$ as a domain administrator)* (87.9Gb/82.9Gb).
CHKDSK when run with no arguments does report something close to what Explorer is reporting 156,252,592 KB used in 262,571 files out of a total space of 177,896,447 KB which is more space used in fewer files than the other methods were reporting.
There are no shadow copies on the disk and I'm currently struggling to understand where my space is being used or how to get any of it back.
I previously increased the size of the hard drive by 20Gb as space was running low, but this seems to have been consumed as well.
It's possible CHKDSK/Explorer are perfectly correct and that much space is being utilised but I really could do with knowing where it is being consumed so I can either free it up or at least understand why.
Can anyone offer any guidance on how I can investigate this further?
*: ncdu is reporting 350,739 items compared to WinDirStat's 347,132 – not sure what the differences are, but the two usage figures appear to be close enough.
Best Answer
Are you sure that its not caused by the Volume shadow copy (VSS) as reported here? It sounds like exactly as written in that article here.
So please check with:
If you see the missing space here.