Constantly filling disk (ThinkVantage?)

I own a T61 with Vista Premium, 150 GB hard drive, ThinkVantage and everything untampered with.

Eventually I noticed that I was running out of disk space (less than a GB free). I had been using the laptop for months so I didn't think twice about the fact that I must've just filled it up. So I deleted some stuff. Soon after the drive was filled again. Idiotically, I repeated this a bunch of times without thinking about it.

Eventually, I deleted around 15 GBs, and noticed the drive fill back up that day.

I investigated the possibility that it was ThinkVantage/Rescue and Recovery. I never intentionally made any backups, and none were listed. I made a full backup on an external drive (now listed as the only backup). I deleted the hidden backup file (I think).

The problem remains. I can't keep more than a few GBs free.

Hints?

Thanks in advance.

 

It's the automatic backups.

 

Thanks for the reply.

That's what I thought. Shouldn't they be listed though?

How can I solve the problem?

 

Open Rescue and Recovery. If you have R&R4 like I do, under the huge "back up" button will be a smaller button that says "change schedule, name a backup, delete backups." Click that. Click "Delete Backups" and it should list all the backups you have on your hard drive. Then delete away! Also click "Schedule" and set it to "Never" to stop the auto backups. Good luck.

 

I have R&R4, though your description of the interface differs a little from what I see.

When I go to delete backups, none are listed. When I click "Set schedule and preferences," there is no "Never" option.

 

Another note...the displayed free space will sometimes fluctuate very quickly from several GBs free to a few hundred MBs (up and down).

Thanks for the help...I've been looking at past, similar threads, and I know this is sort of a familiar issue, but I've yet to figure it out.

 

Vista will also do backups (and multiple ones at that). You can delete all the backups except for the very last one by right clicking on your hard drive, go to disk cleanup, more options tab, cleanup system restore and shadow copies. Cleaned up about 10gb for me. There is also a way to turn shadow copies off completely but I like having at least one vista restore point.

 

When I brought the computer out of sleep mode this morning, after screwing with R&R last night (but not, I thought, doing anything helpful), I gained 70 GBs of free space. Not sure what I did (I definitely didn't delete anything, unless it was a side-effect). After deleting the shadow copies this morning, I gained about 10 more GBs.

Thanks guys! I'm just going to leave R&R alone, for fear that the problem will come back.