virtualbox.org

Hi all, new member here. I'm having a problem and I don't have a clue what could be causing it. I'm running VirtualBox on a Mac OSX Leopard host with a Windows 7 guest. I created it using 80 gb of storage and I've noticed that every time I start the W7 guest the storage it has used has increased by anywhere from 100-300 mb's. Now I'm only using 17 of the 80 gb at the moment, so it isn't that critical yet, but it is still a little disconcerting to see the amount of storage used continue to climb by 100-300 mb when I know I'm not putting many files on it. All I really use it for is working with office documents. Any ideas why the space used keeps increasing even though I'm not really adding any documents or files other than the occasional word or powerpoint document?

I assume you are using a dynamically expanding VDI, with 80GB as the max allocation. It will grow every time Windows writes to a previously untouched 1MB area of the disk, so I assume that is precisely what is happening. As to what Windows is writing and why, I can't tell you. You should check the guests task manager to see what tasks you have running. Background defragmenters, file indexing etc could all have an effect like this. Eventually I'd expect the rate of growth to slow down though, as it becomes less and less likely that an abritrary write will be to a completely new area of the drive.

Thanks for the help, mpack. As far as the VDI is concerned, within the settings it just says Normal...and yes it is set to a max of 80 gb. I have to admit I'm not sure of the differences between dynamically expanding and normal VDI, although I do recall having a choice regarding the type of storage I wanted to use when I created the virtual machine.

Dynamically expanding is the "normal" or default option. What it means is that the disk will start off empty and expand as necessary to hold the vm's data. If you had used fixed you would have lost 80G immediately (or the disk creation would have failed because 80G was not available).

A Windows installation will steadily grow. That is a fact of life.

I'm glad what its doing is normal. I never new that windows would expand that much basically on its own, good to know though. I'll keep an eye on it and see how it does going forward. Thanks for the help.