System volume information

[BassB]

[B]first before i forget system specs:[/B]
[url=http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=1390459][img]http://valid.canardpc.com/cache/banner/1390459.png[/img][/url]
(windows vista home premium 32 bit)

so i recently defragged my pc with defraggler (it hadn't been defragged for over 2 years!) and decided to take a look at it again, i noticed a LOT of red squares. and also that my hard drive lost over 100gb of storage space.

Defraggler told me these files were in a map called "System Volume Information" it was hidden and protected, but i granted myself acces to it, now looking inside the map i noticed some giant files.
[img_thumb]http://i.imgur.com/sSSAW.png[/img_thumb]

if you look above you see similar named files, but as you can see they differ in size a shitload ("Grootte" means Size)
there is one almost 40 GB and one over 80 GB, then also one over 5gb and one about 300MB big.

these files must have been added over the span of about a week, i'm scared of deleting them because i don't know what they do. i did google, but couldn't find anything that matched what is happening to me (given i don't know a lot about these sorts of things).

is this some sort of bug? worm? virus? praying mantis?

help me!

[aVoN]

System volume information is a systemfolder used for Shadow Copy (Restore Points).

Either disable System Recovery or leave everything as it is (A simply google-search could have answered that)

[BassB]

but why would it just start to create these awesomely huge files just now?

[aVoN]

Didn't you read? It's from the Shadow Copy service which responsible for e.g. creating restore-points of your system.
Windows automatically creates some from time to time. It especially creates some when you install system-critical stuff. E.g. drivers. Every restore point eats memory of course.

[BassB]

i see, that makes sense, i have installed new videocard drivers yesterday, and did some updating on windows.

just strange that they start to create now (from what i read they never get deleted)

is there an explanation for the increasing ginormity of the system restore points? (according to windows these were made a day apart) or do they simply add to the last system restore point?