I then checked the box pertaining to stop VSS when defragmenting NTFS volume as well as deleting SR points and turning off the windows system restore completely for the drive then tried re-running defraggler as before the free space decreased while the use space increased I tried on both defrag free space with and without defragmenting (from the advanced menu) in all cases I had NOT optimized with move large files to the end (of disk) and this option was not enabled. I have tried multiple attempts at defraging the free space now, first time I had not read the articles and noticed very slow to defrag, high disk activity and yellow square reading the same block until I stopped the run.
Hi, I've read both the pinned Why is my free space going down (disabling VSS) and I've lost over 200 GB (while defraging free space) articles.