Lost 15 gig disk space after using system restore

Scottyboy99 said:

I think doing the system restore has swallowed the data somewhere (and now it’s probably orphaned).

That can definitely happen - you have contents in System Volume Information but Windows reports no restore points. It happened to me.

Check with TreeSize - it will tell you where the space is being used.

The easiest way to delete them if this is the case is boot from PE (Macrium recovery USB would do) or a Linux repair USB and then just delete the directory.

There is a more complicated way here you could try if you don't want to download anything : can not delete old restore points Solved - Page 2 - Windows 7 Help Forums

lx07 said:

Check with TreeSize - it will tell you where the space is being used.

Thank you! I've tried the free one from M$ market, launched it as an administrator and finally found an orphaned C:\System Volume Information\SystemRestore folder left from the failed with a 0x80070005 error system restore procedure worth 3.7GB of space. Turned off the system restore, used the takeown /f "C:\System Volume Information\SystemRestore" /a /r /d y to take ownership (just in case) and shift-deleted the SystemRestore folder right from the TreeSize app. Alas, it wasn't wiped out entirely, some folders remained regarding MSO bundle with TreeSize stumbling over those looking like symlinks (although the dir command in cmd prompt showed no sign of it). The cacls "C:\System Volume Information\SystemRestore" /e /t /c /g administrators:F for some reason proved unuseful in this particular case thus leading me to adding personal user account with full rights to acl via security tab, after that the rd /s "C:\System Volume Information\SystemRestore" bullet finally finished the job. So far, so good.

cereberus said:

No such thing as M$ market.

Microsoft Store, my bad.