I have a couple of Windows 2003 servers that regularly trigger low-disk alerts around 3 AM. The alert then resets within 15 minutes. Typically these servers have about 40% free on their C: drive, but during those 15 minutes have less than 10% free.
I set up a scheduled task to run dir /s > c:\log.txt at 3:05 AM using a domain admin account. I was able to "catch" the server with a full drive last night.
These are the last lines of the log.txt file from 3 AM:
Total Files Listed:
31660 File(s) 7,710,072,795 bytes
14625 Dir(s) 406,929,408 bytes free
400 MB free! And here is the output of dir right now:
Total Files Listed:
31615 File(s) 7,693,175,876 bytes
14572 Dir(s) 3,516,493,824 bytes free
But if I diff the files, I can't account for more than 17 MB worth of differences. Where is 3 GB going?
I see no events in the event log for VSS and backups run from 11-12.
I'm out of ideas here. What else should I be looking at?
Best Answer
Try using Tree Size Pro. You can schedule it to run with command line options and dump the output to an xml file (during the space loss), then use the "compare with xml file" option to find exactly where the space has gone.