Limited Restore Points?

[Julian]

It has been bugging me: why there are so few System Restore Points on my
system (and on the one occasion I really neeeded it, only 1 - which was too
recent)

[System = Vista HP laptop, 100GB disk, System Restore having private >11GB
of its own disk space but 10GB still free, only C monitored]

Here's a partial answer that raises other questions...

I ran Cmd "as Admin", typed "vssadmin List ShadowStorage" and noted it said
the "used shadow copy storage space" is 10.871GB of the allocated 11.451...
which would explain why I currently see only 4 restore points in System
Restore...[wow... all the way back to 20 Feb]

But I haven't been doing *that* much! How come Vista [HP] is eating ~2.5GB
per restore point? Is it snapshotting the entire Windows system?

Even in theory this is close to useless when Vista creates scheduled restore
points once or twice a day (the 2 may have been an update install): since
Vista doesn't need to be restarted that often it might be days before a
problem is noted on restart... by which time any good restore points are
gone. [In practice it was totally useless...] What's triggering restore
point creation if there are no updates or applications
installed/uninstalled?

Is there any way it can be tweaked to gain a longer history... or, should I
turn it off, reclaim the disk space and use Acronis' "Safe Zone" and/or rely
on my external Acronis backups?

Informed advice much appreciated!

 

[Bob]

Sytem Restore automatically creates a restore point daily.

To reduce (or increase) the disk space allocated, type (or copy and paste)
"vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=6GB." (without the
quotes) Press Enter. Example assumes changing the space on
drive C to 6GB. Create a restore point immediately after resizing.

 

[C.B.]

It has been bugging me: why there are so few System Restore Points on my
system (and on the one occasion I really neeeded it, only 1 - which was
too recent)

[System = Vista HP laptop, 100GB disk, System Restore having private >11GB
of its own disk space but 10GB still free, only C monitored]

Here's a partial answer that raises other questions...

I ran Cmd "as Admin", typed "vssadmin List ShadowStorage" and noted it
said the "used shadow copy storage space" is 10.871GB of the allocated
11.451... which would explain why I currently see only 4 restore points in
System Restore...[wow... all the way back to 20 Feb]

But I haven't been doing *that* much! How come Vista [HP] is eating ~2.5GB
per restore point? Is it snapshotting the entire Windows system?

Even in theory this is close to useless when Vista creates scheduled
restore points once or twice a day (the 2 may have been an update
install): since Vista doesn't need to be restarted that often it might be
days before a problem is noted on restart... by which time any good
restore points are gone. [In practice it was totally useless...] What's
triggering restore point creation if there are no updates or applications
installed/uninstalled?

Is there any way it can be tweaked to gain a longer history... or, should
I turn it off, reclaim the disk space and use Acronis' "Safe Zone" and/or
rely on my external Acronis backups?

Informed advice much appreciated!

Julian,

Open the Task Scheduler. Click on "Task Scheduler Library" in the left
pane, then click on Microsoft and then click on Windows. You will get a
listing of the different applications you can schedule tasks for. Select
System Restore and then schedule it to run as you please, using whichever
triggers you desire.

C.B.

 

[Julian]

Thanks guys...

Yes, I could increase the space allocated for System Restore but with only
10GB free I would get at most another 4 days history... and a completely
full disk for very marginal benefit (Vista is generally very reliable - I
restart on average only about once a week... so the span of the history is
crucial)

I don't need to schedule the creation of more restore points I'd like fewer,
but I've yet to see how to achieve this.

Any other ideas?

 

[Bob]

Sorry, I have no other ideas.

When following up to a previous post, you don't need to include everything.
Snip out what's not relevant. But do include what is relevant. Some people
may have missed the original post.