System Volume Information Growing Uncontrollably

disk-space-utilizationwindows-server-2003

We have a small 12GB system drive on our Windows 2003 server, and after I freed up a couple GB, it continues to consume hard drive space. I used SpaceSniffer to help isolate the issue, and see that System Volume Information folder has grown from 2.9Gb to 3.9Gb overnight.

It goes up consistently throughout the day. We have SQL Server on the server plus a few other apps like an AV program and an IIS server. I disabled the SQL Server Agents to isolate out that possibility. We noticed the .ci files inside SVI are heavily fragmented although I'm not sure that is it or not. There are a few .ci files that have grown, like 00010003.ci, 00010000C.co and 000100006.ci. What could be causing System Volume Information to grow like this.

Edit: I've seen a few suggestions on other posts, to look at Shadow Copying and Sytem Restore, but these are both turned off as far as I know. There is another app called Dialogic, though, which I'm unfamiliar with.

Edit 2: I just noticed Indexing Service is running and using 1.5 Gb in the SVI folder. Is it safe to stop and delete it?

Best Answer

It turned out Indexing Service was consuming a ridiculous amount of space, trying to grow beyond what was available. I removed and recreated Indexing Service Catalogs under Computer Management and freed up space.

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You're looking for the Win32_LogicalDisk WMI class (Specifically the status property)

You could use either PowerShell or VBScript to access this class.

Note I Don't have a Software Raid setup to test these against and they are just samples not fully fleshed out code

A quick PowerShell Script would look something like this:

$CheckDrive = gwmi -query "Select * from Win32_LogicalDisk where DeviceID='C:'"
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Or if you wanted to loop through a bunch of drives you could do something like:

$CheckDrive = gwmi Win32_LogicalDisk
foreach ($i in $CheckDrive){$i.properties.Status}

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Status
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   Access type: Read-only
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