Backup drive suddenly filled up

[dslabbekoorn]

I backup my 3 clients to a non-pool 3tb drive, as I could never get Windows Server 2012 to let me backup to the pool.  This has worked well until I upgraded to Windows 10.  Since then my backup drive has been filling up alarmingly fast.  Today I only have 20gb left.  My retention policy has kept it well within the 3tb for months, now it's filling up, fast. 

 

I may have found the culprit in File History, it defaults to "on"  on all machines and tries to backup all the files in each computers largest folders, twice a day.  I think I have it turned off again and on the server too. 

 

My question is as I have deleted backups and run cleanup, my drive is still full.  In fact free space went down after letting cleanup remove 2/3 of my backups.  Can I just delete the contents of the backup drive and let it start over?  Are there any files on the drive that have to stay?  I'm getting low disk space warnings from windows but nothing about the backup folder being full from the server, is that normal?  Also there seems to be 2 kinds of files, many with names like: data4096.1 (the last number changes like a counter 1,2,3 ect) (all around 4 gigs in size) and others like: S-1-5-21-3523175288-3874004036-3139489072-1124.C.FileRecordHash.4096 ( fewer but varying in size from 8 kb to 17 gb) 

 

 Any help?

[lee1978]

Hi

 

On a similar note after upgrading to win10 my ssd went from 40% full to only 10% left download tree size and discovered over 45gig in the windows installer folder now after googling a lot said never touch it but I did find one post that had a link to a utility that scans the installer folder and deletes any unused files you can even move them to another drive in case you get problems. it's risky but my installer folder went from 45 gig to 3.3gig now that's a risk I am willing to take and that's a lot to back up too also. I'll get the name of the software when I get home from work or try google "how to clean up windows installer folder" I only found programmes one was microsofts which has been removed and the one I used.