Rescue and Recovery? NOT!

This post is very unusual for me and I promise not to make a habit of things like this. But....I am just amazed and stunned by this whole ordeal and have to share it with somebody. Lucky you!

I have a Lenovo 3000 series desktop computer that I bought about a year ago. It has Vista on it and 225 gb hard drive. It came pre loaded with some Lenovo software called Think Vantage, Rescue & Recovery. I went through the tutorials when I first got the computer as we all do (right?). I found out that the system is set to automatically make backups of your ENTIRE system so that in case of a failure you can recover. Sounds good huh? One glitch, the default is set to make the back up to your hard drive. Now, excuse me, I'm no computer genius, but doesn't it seem a tad bit let me think...how to put this fairly....IN-FREAKIN'-SANE!! to backup your hard drive that might go bad to your hard drive. Somebody please explain the logic to me!

So, I went in to the program and turned off the automatic backup and assumed all was cool.

Fast forward to this spring...I began noticing that my hard drive space was down to about 50 gb. And everytime I would look at it, there was less space. Last week I finally got really concerned when I saw that I only had 11 gb free. I went through all the files and could not come up with anywhere near the 200+ gb that I must be using to only have 11 gb free. I downloaded a program called Treesize (freeware) and it didn't show any unusually large files.

Enter google....I googled "lenovo disappearing hard disk space". And found some information that said the Rescue and Recovery program was the culprit. No way, I thought smugly. I turned that backup off. Hmph! But what the hell, I'll check into it. As it turns out, there are two different places that you have to turn off the scheduled backups. One in the Rescue and Recovery program which I did and another in the Maintenance program which I did not. So, it was making backups to my hard drive of my hard drive. Genius!

So, I opened the Rescue & Recovery program, clicked on the advanced tab, clicked on Delete Backups....and it gave me a list of the backups. There were six and they totalled 150+ gb. Can you believe this?? So, I went through the list and deleted them. A word of advice here...start with the most recent backup and delete in that order. In other words, start at the bottom of the list and delete up. Any other order takes forever. Trust me, I tried.

I am so happy now. I have 160 gb free!!