Loss of Vista Restore Points

[Tommy Tillman]

Hi Gang!

I have Windows Vista Ultimate SP1 on my home PC. I recently noticed some
odd behavior.

I used to have at least 10 restore points in my System Restore. But
yesterday I noticed that it now only had 4 restore points!

I have 2 Hard Drives - C is set to allow 20 gigs for restore points (and
shadow copies) and the D drive is set to about 60 gigs for restore points
(and shadow copies). The C drive is 160 Megs total and the D drive is 500
Megs.

So that would be about 5 gigs per restore point (20/4)? Or is there
something else going on?

I noticed that ALL my files appear to have shadow copies.... why? I looked
at my D: drive... that is where I store my music and pictures... and there
appear to be many shadow copies of the pictures... even though I have not
changed them in any way!

Can all this be a side effect of some other program making it appear that
the files have been changed... then shadow copy service says... "make a
copy!!".. and then I run out of storage space for the copies on C and D
causing the system restores to kick out the older restore points to make
room? I am thinking along the lines of virus checkers... spyware
checkers....

What do you think???

 

[Tommy Tillman]

Thanks for the link. I have checked that info already, but it didn't help.

Thanks, again!

 

[Paul Montgomery]

I used to have at least 10 restore points in my System Restore. But
yesterday I noticed that it now only had 4 restore points!

Do you have the box checked to show points older than 5 days?

 

[Tommy Tillman]

Yes - funny thing is, sometimes it doesn't show - I guess in those cases,
there aren't any restore points 5 days back.

Even stranger - the opening screen of the Restore Points form doesn't give
me any option to select the the preselected restore point, or select one of
the others on the next screen. It just has the introductory text at the top
of the form.

Thanks!

 

[Paul Montgomery]

Yes - funny thing is, sometimes it doesn't show - I guess in those cases,
there aren't any restore points 5 days back.

Even stranger - the opening screen of the Restore Points form doesn't give
me any option to select the the preselected restore point, or select one of
the others on the next screen. It just has the introductory text at the top
of the form.

That happens when there aren't very many to choose from.

How large is your hard drive? Reason I ask... 15% of it is reserved
for restore points. If you have a relatively small drive (by today's
standards), you will have fewer restore points.

Note also: restore points in Vista are HUGE compared to those in XP.
15% of your drive would probably hold 3 or more months of restore
points (with some days having several restore points) in XP. With a
100gig drive, you'd be lucky to hold 20 restore points in total.

 

[Rick Rogers]

From an elevated command prompt:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

This will tell you if you are currently using all the allocated space.

vssadmin list shadows

will list the available points and details about them.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com