my laptop hard drive (originally 250GB )is partitioned into two with the "E" section being for automatic backup by windows Vista.
I noticed it says there is only 13.5 Gb's left free on the E (out of the 125) which really suprised me so I click on it to view the folders and files and can only find 25 Gb's of data . What is going on here?
thanks in advance from a computer novice

so when you right click on the disk, how much free space and how much used space does it show?

The backups could be down as hidden or system files which by default can't be seen.

Open an explorer window (computer, my docs, etc), go to the tools menu, and select folder options, click on the view tab, and then part way down is the option to show hidden files/folders. tick that, click ok etc then recheck your E: drive, you will hopefully get a better idea of what's using up the space.

samuri..it shows 100gb used 14.9 free

hp..now showing hidden file/folders too but they come to a total of only a few kb's

if i look at the properties of all the files /folders etc they only total roughly 25gb not 100!!

it shouldn't be a big deal unless you were planning on resizing the partition or something?

Del ..I just want to find out why it's so full and get rid of things I don't need to make room for more backup

Backing up a hard disk to itself (if I read this right it's just the one disk) really isn't very sensible at all

cheesy.. I just followed the windows backup wizard etc ..but I see your point.as I say I'm a pc novice

you can right click on each directory and click properties and it will tell you how big each directory is, you can then trace down where the space is taken up. or is this what you've already done?

yep already done that

it's not really meant as a backup in the true sense – more an enhanced system restore if windows goes all t1ts up, rather than a backup of all your data in case the HD fails. if you want a proper backup get an external hd – you can get 'em for about 50quid.
the backup software is very good at hiding it's files until accessed through it's own interface. it's to stop you deleting stuff that they're trying to preserve for you. i'd just let it get on with it unless you're getting error messages due to insufficient space?
dell system by any chance?

Toshiba
I'm going to buy a 1tb external hard drive then copy everything from the E drive partition. after that I'll delete everything in that partition to free up the space on the laptop itself.
One thing I'm concerned about is that if I can't see what's on there then deleting after making a copy might F### things up …no?