Is it safe to delete the following files?

[Frank Martin]

During the installation of a printer it was necessary to do
a System Restore several times.

This seems to have produced many files, printed in blue, on
the C:\System Volume Informatiuon drive\restore...folder
eg.
_restore{28E78E49-C773-4429-9791-EDC92051AAF4}

They all have the date the System Restore was performed.

Since these take up a lot of room, can I delete them?

Frank

 

[Terry R.]

On 11/27/2009 2:45 PM On a whim, Frank Martin pounded out on the keyboard

During the installation of a printer it was necessary to do
a System Restore several times.

This seems to have produced many files, printed in blue, on
the C:\System Volume Informatiuon drive\restore...folder
eg.
_restore{28E78E49-C773-4429-9791-EDC92051AAF4}

They all have the date the System Restore was performed.

Since these take up a lot of room, can I delete them?

Frank

Hi Frank,

You shouldn't be messing with anything in that folder!


Terry R.

 

[Frank Martin]

Thanks, I have reduced the space for System Restore from 12%
to 9%.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Thanks, I have reduced the space for System Restore from 12%
to 9%.

Here's my view on the amount of space you should have:

First, the number you select should be some number of GB, not a
percentage of the drive. It depends on how big your drive is, but 9%
sounds much too high to me.

I recommend that you reduce the amount to a week or two's worth
(around 1-2GB); the number you get with XP's default allocation is too
large. If you go back too far, you tend to get the registry out of
synch with other files on the drive. A lot of restore points aren't
really useful.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I took it back to 6% (about 4Gb) anfd now the free space on
the C: drive looks much healthier. I have to say that
the System Restore has been very useful on many occasions.

Five points:

1. I'm not questioning whether System Restore is useful. I completely
agree with you. The only question is how many restore points you
should keep, which governs how far back you can go.

2. 4GB will let you go back four weeks or more. I think that's too
much, and going back that far can often cause problems of its own (see
my quote below).

3. On the other hand, *if* you have sufficient disk space, I don't
strenuously to your having that much. My objection is to relying on
it, not to using the disk space.

4. So going from 12% to 6% saved you 4GB and that makes the free space
look much healthier? In my view, 4GB is a tiny amount of disk space;
You apparently have about a 60GB drive, and that's 1/16 of the drive,
about $3 (US) worth.

5. If saving 4GB of disk space is meaningful to you, that's highly
likely to be nothing but a stopgap measure, and you will soon find
yourself short of disk space again. These day, new drives are very
inexpensive and I highly recommend that you either replace your drive
with a bigger one or add another drive.