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My laptop hard drive is getting smaller by my image backup size

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I backed up my entire hard drive which was 50 GB to an external drive, but now instead of my main internal laptop drive having only 50 gigabytes used, it now shows a hundred gigabytes used and now I have much smaller space left over on my internal laptop hard drive.

 

So what must be happening is somehow there is an error or it is saving the files on my laptop drive as well as my external. Does anyone know how I can get back to my original 50 gigabyte size again? Now just in case you're wondering, I'm making an image of my laptop  hard drive to a plugged in external.  And when I go to my external it is they're showing my laptop backup. But now instead of having only 50 GB used on my internal laptop if now shows 100 gigabytes. So what is going on here and how can I correct this and get back to my original 50 GB hard drive as I somehow have lost a 50 GB.

 

Thanks to anyone that can help me because this losing of my hard drive space really makes it hard for me because I am backing up an encrypted safe on this base and I need that extra 50 gigabytes. Thank you so much for anyone who can help.

 

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Darryl, welcome to these User Forums.

We will need more information to try to understand what is happening here and taking up the additional disk space on your laptop?

Please download the MVP Log Viewer (from the Community tools link below) and use this to look at the task log messages for your laptop backup.  You can post the log as a text file to allow us to review this with/for you.

I have not seen any reports of any similar issues and haven't ever encountered this type of issue myself in my years of using ATI across numerous different versions.

Screen shots of your backup task settings may also help, i.e. are you making a backup reserve copy (Advanced options page) and if so, where is this being written?

Have you tried to check where the extra 50GB of disk space is located on your disk drive?  Try using the TreeSize Free program to show where space is taken on the drive.

Has your Windows installation had a major version upgrade lately?  Do you see a folder on your hard drive called C:/windows.old?  If you have this folder how big is it?

 

I found the problem, it was my system restore causing the error on my hard drive, once I deleted my system restore points and tuned of restore, then on again, my hard drive space was back again...

I found the problem, it was my system restore causing the error on my hard drive, once I deleted my system restore points and tuned of restore, then on again, my hard drive space was back again...

Darryl, if you are running with Windows 10, then Microsoft defaults to turning off System Restore points (System Protection).  This data is stored in the System Volume Information hidden system folders on your drive, and is also excluded from your backups by default by ATI.

See webpage: How to Enable System Restore (and Repair System Problems) on Windows 10 for more information.