Where has my disc space gone?

[yebaws]

I have a 500GB hard drive that is separate from my system hard drive. I use it to backup files onto every night with Cobian Backup. Each backup is only about 2GB and I set it so that 2 consecutive copies are kept. There's a few other thing on that drive, but adding up the total of all files, I get to less than 25 GB. But I recently had a message saying that I was running out of disc space and when I looked at that drive it tells me that there is only 53GB free of 465GB. (It was actually less, but I deleted some stuff).

I have Vista set up so that it shows all file types and I can see nothing that would account for all of that disc space. I've been backing up onto this disc for a few months now and, although the old backups appear to have been deleted as they should be, it seem that windows doesn't acknowledge this. Recycle bin on that drive is empty. No doubt I could just format the drive and start again (It's only backups, so I won't loose anything unless my other hard drive chooses that moment to fail -eek-) but I think the same problem will come 'round again in a few months.

Same data for disc volume from CP>>admin>>disc tools also. Virus scans clear.

Any ideas?

Thanks

[EzyStvy]

Double check the backup settings. Sounds like its backing up more then you thing.

System Restore is probably turned on and taking 12% of the drive space. Recycle Bin also reserver 10% or more of drive space.

[yebaws]

Originally Posted by EzyStvy Double check the backup settings. Sounds like its backing up more then you thing. System Restore is probably turned on and taking 12% of the drive space. Recycle Bin also reserver 10% or more of drive space.

doesn't explain all of that missing space and why the size of the files on the disc doesn't add up to the disc space used. A full backup takes about 30 mins, which isn't 100's of GB's..