Disc Copy 2.3 ate up all my external hard drive-- from 320GB to 37GB now!

[Allan]

Yes, but it will just reappear. It's placed there by system restore. If you don't want restore points created for that drive disable system restore on it - but the folder will likely still be created and left empty.

[sirzune]

Thank you.  I just noticed something strange:  On the external drive there's 73mb of used space.  This drive is supposed to be empty as I deleted the partition that had C drive contents on it, yet I see no files.  Strange, or what?  Just found out is metadata.  What???

[BC_Programmer]

Okay, all is fine now.  I deleted the partition in computer services, and formatted the external hard drive to its full capacity with Easeus Partition Master.  the only other thing is now there is an empty foloer on the external drive called "System Volume Information", but it's an empty folder, like my wallet.  Can I safely delete it?  I, again, thank you guys.

That's a system folder that contains some bits of the NTFS data structures, and a few other things. You can't delete it anyway.

[Allan]

That's a system folder that contains some bits of the NTFS data structures, and a few other things. You can't delete it anyway.

System Volume Information is for System Restore Points - nothing else. And it can be deleted on drivers where System Restore is not enabled.

[BC_Programmer]

System Volume Information is for System Restore Points - nothing else. And it can be deleted on drivers where System Restore is not enabled.

While I was incorrect in that it contains bits of the NTFS filesystem ($MFT and friends are stored on the root of the drive, not in there). but, It is not <only> used for system restore points, it's used for a few other things, like the Vista/7 Search databases, Volume Shadow copy, and the Content Indexing service.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/oldnewthing/archive/2003/11/20/55764.aspx

And it <can> be deleted, yes, but you will need to mess around with security permissions of the folder in order to gain access.

[Computer_Commando]

If he formats volume as FAT32, nothing will remain.