Vanishing Hard Drive Space

I nearly had a meltdown last night after discovering that my hard drive space was down to only 8GB. Now the last time I had this issue it turned out to be multiple restore points had been made while installing a very large program - which had to be installed a couple of times to get it right. No worry - just delete them and off you go.

Well that certainly wasn't the case this time. Of course I did all the usual things, emptied the Recycle Bin; deleted any stray files, but that didn't even begin to free up any space.

In desperation I Googled, "suddenly lost hard drive space" and there I found my answer amongst one of the first search results. A post on the Volume Shadow Copy Service by Benjamin Day supplied me with all the information that I needed to get myself back up and running. Seems that my computer had 157GB allocated to shadowstorage.

The real question is why did it suddenly change? For now though, I am very happy to to have been able to go from 7GB to 170GB using only two commands.