I have two drives on my computer, the C drive and the D drive, each 89 gigs. Because I have a lot of music, I use the D drive exclusively for music files. Lately, there is a mystery gap of 12 gigs - that is, my music library, the only thing on the disk, is at 77 gigs, but my drive is full. Now I'm getting notices that the backup has failed. I incrementally cleared several gigs of space, but the backups still failed. Not only that, but they ate the space anyway. Now, I can't find these backups anywhere, and I've followed the instructions on a variety of sites. I reduced the allocated space for my system restore, but that cleared space on my C drive. My computer does not list anything on my D drive except for music and a couple of empty folders. How can I find and delete the backup files so that I can do a complete back-up instead of the incremental backup which seems to be out of control?
Open Disk Clean-up and go to More Options tab. Click Clean up at System Restore and Shadow Copies. Or right click on drive d , click properties and click on disk clean up. there you have choices to make for file backup deletion.
Thank you for your response; unfortunately, I have tried both of these things already. In neither case do I actually see the backup file(s) listed, but both tell me that I have 0KB ready for cleanup. Am I correct in assuming that 12 gigs is way too big for a system backup? I back up my music separately (on the C drive), so I'm only backing up 60 gigs or so. That change is fairly recent, so it's probably still backed up, but it won't decrease the size of my backup and is unable to replace it...
you have told us the size of your c drive but not the the size used for files and system 12 GB maybey to small for a system backup have you tried booting with a PE disk that may let you get access to files.
Well, I don't really have much to back up. As I mentioned, I back up my music files separately, and have a hard copy of almost all of it. I have some pictures and videos that I keep on the computer for ease of reference, but are also backed up on a hard copy. Even though I deselect these in the back up options, Vista backs them up anyway. What's killing me is that the partial (failed) backups take up space and cannot be deleted, at least not by any means that I have been able to discover. I just cleared 5 gigabytes and attempted a new backup; it was about 90-95% finished (judging from the bar) when it failed. Now I have about 5 MEGAbytes. Currently, 18 gigs is being taken up by this backup problem; I've turned off auto backup, but I really want my disk space back.