free space defrag problem bug?

[whitefly]

Hi, I've read both the pinned Why is my free space going down (disabling VSS) and I've lost over 200 GB (while defraging free space) articles.  I have tried multiple attempts at defraging the free space now, first time I had not read the articles and noticed very slow to defrag, high disk activity and yellow square reading  the same block until I stopped the run. I then checked the box pertaining to stop VSS when defragmenting NTFS volume as well as deleting SR points and turning off the windows system restore completely for the drive then tried re-running  defraggler as before the free space decreased while the use space increased I tried on both defrag  free space with and without defragmenting (from the advanced menu) in all cases I had NOT optimized with move large files to the end (of disk) and this option was not enabled. 

Incidentally I was hoping that I would see blocks moving from the end to the front during this process but the program seemed only interested in what appeared to be fine near the front (beginning) where there were no gaps and did not look like it needed to be processed.

Has anyone else noticed this? 

AT the start User space:     119 668 412 416 bytes 

                    Free space: 1 229 279 797 248 bytes

 

some time later  (showing done 1% completed)

                   User space:     119 895 130 112    bytes up      226 717 696

                   Free space:  1 229 053 075 456   bytes  down 226 721 792

 

So if the numbers are to be believed my user space is growing and free space shrinking. I never completed the defrag as I think it would not finish in a reasonable time.(in fact I doubt it would finish at all).

[mylesb]

I was about to give up with this program after losing over 100 GB of hard drive free space when I ran it. It was scary watching the disk space just disappear right in front of my eyes.

 

Then I had to start reading the forum posts to see if anyone else is having this problem. Wow, I'm not alone.

 

I read the vss post where you need to go into an Administrator role to run the command prompt and tried it.

 

It worked. I got back 110GB, at least, 110 GigaBytes of disk space after deleting the "shadow copies". 110 GB!!!

 

Who'd have thought that defragmenting a drive would increase the amount of space. I thought that the idea was to "compact the fragmented files".  That is, make a fragmented file less fragmented.

 

Then when I ran DF again, I lost another 10 GB. I ran the vss command again and deleted the files and I got back 10 GB of disk space.  When will I ever learn? It's a disaster.

 

I think i forgot the reason I purchased Defraggler.

 

Isn't supposed to compress the file structure so the files are closer together and less access time etc etc?

 

Why did I buy this program? It seems to have consumed a lot of time troubleshooting. I'm thinking I will just go back to Windows Defrag. Why not?  Wish I could get a refund. It's been a real waste of time.

 

Sorry, but, This program needs some help before I can recommend it to anyone and I wished I hadn't actually purchased it. I Free Trial is indeed recommended from me.

 

Yikes!

[Guest MrK]

This should help: http://forum.piriform.com/index.php?showtopic=35459 and further documentation can also be found here: http://www.piriform.com/docs