Recently I decided to try and get the defrgmentation on all my drives to 0% on my virtual host and server. For some reason I could not get the OS drive and a backup drive down to 0%. The OS was at 27% fragmented and the backup at 35%. After attempting my third defrag I decided to take a look at the fragmented files on the drives with defraggler. Turns out I had some large ISO’s on the OS drive that i could move over, which I did, however the page file is still counting for a large portion of fragmentation which I’ll deal with later. (Page file is 8GB in size and the OS is only 80GB total so it will count for a good portion of fragmentation.) Onto the backup drive, which had a bunch of files in the system volume information store.Something like 300GB+ 🙁
Reclaiming the space is really easy. Just right click on the drive and go to properties. Click on the shadow copies tab and then highlight the drive in question and click on settings. Set the maximum size to 320MB and then click ok and ok again. The VSS files will be immediately deleted and you can double check by exploring the folder. After the files are removed go back to the properties and set the maximum size to 10240MB or something that matches your policy.