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Stephen HoyleFlag for United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

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Find cause of C drive growth Windows 2012 Server Essentials

I'm running a Windows 2012 Server Essentials box which also has SQL Server 2012 installed. It has two drive partitions C and D. All data, network shares, SQL data and logs are on the D drive. I have disabled all client machine backups.

I'm also running Storagecraft ShadowProtect and Image Manager to backup the C and D drives and then replicate them offsite.

The problem I'm having is that the C drive is growing randomly by at least 2GB per day, which is causing problems replicating the ShadowProtect backup images over the 0.5Mbps upload ADSL link I have.

Can anyone help me track down what is causing the growth of the C drive?

I have mounted two backup images of the C drive at a point where it has grown 3GB between backups to try and compare and find where the increase is. I should point out that the C drive has actually grown, it's not just a change in the size of the backup images created.

The Page file is currently on the C Drive, but doesn't appear to have changed between these backups.

The strange thing is that if I look at the properties of the first image, it is 114GB in size, the second is 117GB. However if I view the properties of each folder in each of the images, they are all virtually the same size.

Can someone help me where this growth is hiding please?
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David Atkin
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Fantastic - thank you! I had been trying to find a program to identify large files and Windirstat has quickly identified the cause of the problem.

Essentials does a backup on any Windows 8 clients by default of "File History Backups" which includes users My Documents folder. One of my users had a 2.5GB pst file in his My Docs which he adds to on a regular basis, so this was being backed up to the C drive at least once a day with a default retention period of 12 months!

File history backup is now turned off and hopefully problem resolved.