WTF?

[swestrup]

Another Windows XP mystery:

The backup of my hard drive just failed with a 'Not enough space' error, despite the fact that I am backing up from one drive to an identical drive and there is over 25 gig free on the source drive.

After deleting everything on the destination (ie, one humongous backup file), I noticed there was only about 2/3 of the amount of space there should be. All disk tests checked out normal. The trash can is empty. I don't have any sort of indexing on (and how much indexing does 1 file need anyway?).

In the end I reformatted my backup drive and suddenly it was correctly reporting the amount of space. I wonder what on earth happened?

Anyway, I'll let the backup run all night and hopefully it will complete successfully this time.

Comments

[cpirate.livejournal.com]

Windows XP does a few things that can suck up space behind your back. I think the main one is the System Restore Points, where you can restore DLLs and such to their state before you bungled them up - at least that's the idea. These can take up a fair chunk of disk space. I wouldn't have thought they'd suck up your backup disk though.

I think XP also has support for some sort of VAX-style file restores, but that might only be in conjunction with a Windows 2003 server.