With my new laptop, one of the things I realized I’d forgotten to do in setup is reserve some space. I wrote about this years ago, but I wanted to ensure I always had space in the event of an emergency.

Creating Placeholders

In the previous post, I linked to the contig utility from Microsoft. I downloaded this and then copied the new 64-bit utility to my c:\utilities folder, which is where I keep a lot of generic stuff I run.

Then I copied my old command and updated the exe call.

However, I also built a quick batch file to give me 20GB of saved space. I called it create20gb.cmd and it contains this code:

contig64 -n Hold1.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold2.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold3.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold4.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold5.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold6.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold7.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold8.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold9.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold10.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold11.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold12.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold13.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold14.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold15.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold16.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold17.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold18.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold19.place 1073741824
contig64 -n Hold20.place 1073741824

I made a c:\hold folder and dropped the cmd file in there. I then ran it. Here are the results:

Now if I find myself running low on space, I can go in here and delete a few files and get some space back.

I recommend this for all machines, since I’ve run into the space problem so often, usually at a time when I’m stressed and I need space quickly. This makes it easy to get a bit of space back.