Where is my HD memory going?

[kikouyou]

I was worried recently as my X61/Vista Business almost crashed because of a lack of HD memory.
the memory went from 24Gb free to 1.5GB free in a day!
first I thought it was the indexing process and it is part of the issue.
Then I realised the automatic restore point maintenance can eat up your Gb pretty fast, but i could recover most of it with an extensive disk cleanup (see more options and remove restore points)

But not all the memory is back even with an erased index...
the index memory is not where Vista says it is by the way as the index folder has the same size with or without content...

I have tried to limit the indexation process to the ourlook directory, but OneNote is chimming in without the ability to disable it (it comes back!!!)
Now where is the address book? any hint?

so to concude where is it my memory?
Any hints?

[krypticide]

Indexing shouldn't take up that much disk space (you shouldn't call it memory ;). By disk cleanup, did you mean you used Windows's built-in Disk Cleanup utility?

[kikouyou]

Yes the index is not so big in fact, that is not the issue.
Yesterday I gained 5Gb without doing anyting, I guess Vista has done some autocleanup in the background...
The cleanup pgm I used is the built in one

[deusexaethera]

Windows Vista stores older, overwritten versions of files until the space is needed for newer files. That's probably what you're seeing.

[mousetraps]

It's probably a backup from Thinkvantage Rescue and Recovery -- I had a similar problem, except I was missing around 41 GB.

[dds2009]

mousetraps,

What did you do to gain back that 41 GB?? I'm missing about 10.