I have a datastore that’s holding a single Windows Server 2016 VM.

On 10/27 PM the datastore used space was 1,451 GB when I took a VM snapshot and then downloaded/installed Windows Updates. On 10/28 AM I deleted the snapshot and then the datastore used space increased to 1,727 GB. That’s an increase of 276 GB but used space as reported by Windows hardly went up at all.

What would explain a rise in datastore usage like this?

*I added the performance graph as an attachment since it’s not allowing me to upload the image to this post.