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My problem is that something uses large amounts of space on my main partition (100 GB out of 250 GB). I looked for everything and by now I suspect the Windows File History to be the one taking up the space. (see below for steps I did to find the space user). Now when I go to Control Panel and click on File History nothing(!) happens. My system is a Windows 8.1 Pro N, 64 bit

I did/checked the following:

  • Several reboots
  • File History service and Windows Search service is running (also restarted both)
  • The external drive where the File History is stored is connected and working properl (I also tried to disconnect it)
  • In the Action Center it says: File History and Status not available
  • System file check (SFC) with sfc /scannow found no problems.
  • DISM found no problems (Dism /Online /Cleanup-Image /ScanHealth gives: No component store corruption detected. The operation completed successfully.
  • chkdsk found no errors
  • I also noticed that the "show previous versions" option has disappeared from the context menu

So, how can I access (or disable) File History?

While searching what might be eating my SSD space I tried the following:

  • Trash is empty
  • Drive properties dialog shows 225 GB space used
  • When using WinDirStat only 122 GB are used (and >100 GB are shown as "Unknown")
  • When selecting all file (including hidden and system folders) the properties dialog shows: `Size on disk: 122 GB"
  • when I do a chkdsk it shows: 234992384 KB in 691370 files. (which is about 225 GB as above)
  • I checked for NTFS alternate file streams, but only found a few and all of them where very small and in total waaaaay below 100 GB
  • I used the Build-in disk clean up feature (also in admin mode)
  • Also cleand all recovery points (I also did not have any big changes to the system in the last few months) with vssadmin Delete Shadows /For=C: /Oldest
  • There are no pending updates for my system (except optional ones)
  • How to clear 217Gb of <Unknown> space on my C drive? suggest to have a look at C:\Windows\CSC. I did (as described in Where are my offline files if they are not in C:/windows/CSC? ), but this folder contains only a few files with a total of less then 1 MB
  • system files like hyber.sys and swapfile.sys are correctly accounted in the 122 GB used space.
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