Help! System Volume Information eating up disk space!!! Win7

[fattty]

I have a toshiba s305 s6916 laptop
c2d 2.0ghz
4gb ram
hd3650
320gb hard drive (around 290-300 available for use)
Recently i checked how much space i had left on my hard drive and was astounded that only 60gb remained! I took a screenshot using WinDirStat which shows what is taking up hard drive space.

Everything seemed fine except for one thing. System volum Information was 80+gb!!
Someone tell me what this is and how to get rid of it! Thanks i'm a noob at computers and am only 15 >.>
Thought you guys were the right people to come to.

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[Bruce]

Shadow copies or previous versions as win 7 calls it.

right click my computer and go to properties then click system protection on the right and check the settings for the drive and how much space it is allocating for shadow copies.

 

[fattty]

Hmm. I just did what you said and it said that it allowed 15% or like ~44gb and it says current usage is 86gb? How is this possible and are these "shadow copies" needed?
Attached screen

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[KSoD]

Are you sure that there isnt a file called windows.old anywhere on the PC?

 

[Bruce]

That is up to you. Shadow copy is a very cool feature imo. if you right click your drive and click the previous version tab you will see your previous versions. double clicking those will open that previous version of your files. vary handy if a file is deleted accidently or if you make a change and want to revert back.

I'm not sure why yours is well above the limit that was set. you could try deleting the points and starting over. I have mine set to 5% on all drives.

 

[fattty]

Mak- Nope
Bruce- 2 days later i checked my computer space again and saw that it had jumped to to 147 gb free?
I have not deleted anything whatsoever except for a couple pictures. I ran WinDirStat again and found taht the 80gb portion mysterioiusly dissapeared.

 

[Bruce]

Thats weird lol

does previous versions reflect the change too?

 

[fattty]

i dont understand what that means ;P

 

[Bruce]

Like where I had you check in system protection, has that gone down as well?

 

[fattty]

It is still on but it magically changed to 3% by itself? (i didn't touch it)
Don't know why, so i set it to 5% since you have it at 5 too.

Nothing for me to worry about right?