Clear Disk Space Used by the System Volume Information Folder
Our monitoring system report that disk space on a Windows 2008 R2 Enterprise server was very tight, less than 6GB free on a 136GB drive. I checked the folders of the usual suspects that might be using large amounts of disk space, but none were using a large amount of space, and the Recycle Bin was empty. What the heck?
I installed TreeSize Free on the server and discovered that the System Volume Information folder was using nearly 52GB of space. Some searching showed lots of articles related to Windows System Backup or System Restore Points taking up lots of space in SVI, but that wasn’t relevant on this server. I ran across this post, and one of the comments discussed Enabling and then Disabling Shadow Copies on the volume to clear out lots of SVI space.
I looked at the Shadow Copies tab of the Properties of the volume (right-click over the drive in Windows Explorer and choose Properties), and it showed that Shadow Copies was disabled, but showed 50GB+ in the Used column (I didn’t take a screenshot of that unfortunately, but the one below is similar). After doing a bit of research to make sure enabling Shadow Copies is a safe operation to perform on a live production server, I enabled it.
After clicking Yes to enable Shadow Copies, I disabled it by clicking the Disable button and clicking Yes on the confirmation dialog.
After enabling and then disabling Shadow Copies, I re-scanned the volume with TreeSize Free, The System Volume Information folder now took up only 3.0MB!
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