My C: Drive (2TB) was at 17% defragmentation and my D: drive (1 TB) was at 36%, both went down to 0% and barely any space was freed up. Is this normal? Should there not have been a pretty significant change?
I thought it'd be cool to take a screenshot beforehand to see the difference before and after so I'll link those here: http://imgur.com/hlsJ5ri
I also just realized the before picture isn't on the Drive tab but instead on the drive map tab, but to give you an idea it listed over 200GB as fragmented on at least one of them, maybe both, I'm not quite sure anymore. However it was definitely a pretty large number on both, an amount that if really freed would be quite amazing frankly.
I'm working with Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit and of course Defraggler.
I have looked into this and the usual suspects for windows 7 being Shadow copies and system restore points should definitely not be at fault here. I tried to delete both of them and for both it kept telling me that it didn't exist. They are taking up no space whatsoever as far as I can tell. Here is what I'm getting when I try to list the shadows: http://imgur.com/a/pvDpo Trying to delete them gives me the same message.
Any thoughts? If you need any more information.. ask away.
Defragmenting on it's own does not create any more space on the disk, it just moves the data that is 'split-up' into one place. (or at least closer together).
The data still takes up the the same number of bytes, just all in one place instead of being spread over the disk.
To free up space you would have to delete temporary files, unwanted files, duplicate files, etc.
Use Windows Disk clean-up, CCleaner, or another 3rd party temporary/duplicate file cleaner.
The other way to more free space on a disk is to compress the files in some way.
There are plenty of file compression tools out there, how much they compress files will vary and will also depend on the type of file being compressed.
(And of course if you are sending compressed files to someone else then you have to make sure that they can decompress them).
I could only find the Stop VSS option in the options menu and can tell you it was not ticked. As for the others, there was an exclusion tab in the options menu, but nothing was in there if that is what you were talking about. Hopefully that answers your question.
Stop VSS is the important one, when unticked, there have been reports of it creating restore point or shadow copies (can't remember exactly) until the cows come home.