restore points

  • Thread starter Thread starter huggybee
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huggybee

i'm using vista home premium. when i shut down or do a restsart i loose all
my restore points. never had this problem with XP. any ideas? i'm not an
expert so i expect there might be a simple tweek
 
huggybee said:
i'm using vista home premium. when i shut down or do a restsart i loose
all
my restore points. never had this problem with XP. any ideas? i'm not an
expert so i expect there might be a simple tweek
Click to expand...

Believe me, I sympathise :) But a little more information is needed to
understand the problem better...

Do you shut down the computer frrequently?

I believe Vista will normally create System Restore points every day
(midnight-ish) or at Startup if it has been >24 hours since the last one (as
well as on application of Updates etc.).If you have no restore points at all
and you don't restart frequently, I am surprised that they are *all* gone -
I would have expected there to be at least 1 "left" - the one created at
startup.

How many restore points did you have (roughly)? How often has this happened?
At what interval?

A little more information on the PC itself would be helpful too... what is
the size of your C drive?

One possibility: I have read about (though not experienced myself) is that
some "older" utilities such as disk de-fragmenters are not "aware" of the
special "area" that Vista uses for System Restore points and can effectively
clear them. Do you have any 3rd party disk utilities in use?
 
Just about the same problem here, except my restore points disappear within
hours of being created even without a reboot.
Vista Home Premium 32 bits. Do not dual boot. Plenty of disk space.
Any help would be appreciated.



i'm using vista home premium. when i shut down or do a restsart i loose all
my restore points. never had this problem with XP. any ideas? i'm not an
expert so i expect there might be a simple tweek
 
Here's a suggestion to help acquire some relevant information... if you
could post the results back it here it could help

From the Start menu, find Cmd and "run as Administrator"
Type (without the quotes) "vssadmin List ShadowStorage"

Make a note of the time and the Used, Allocated and Maximum storage space
values...

Do this periodically over the course of a day (>24hours) and post the
results back here...

You could also try looking in the Event Viewer for events due to "SR"
(System Restore) and volsnap, which periodically "cleans up" the
ShadowStorage area...
Your results might be illuminating...

....it is a bit dark at the moment

One (?) final (??) question - do you have any large multimedia files... are
you editing video? Do you have TV recording on the PC?

Julian I-Do-Stuff

Some Vista stuff, but mostly just Stuff at http://berossus,blogspot.com

Nameless said:
Just about the same problem here, except my restore points disappear
within
hours of being created even without a reboot.
Vista Home Premium 32 bits. Do not dual boot. Plenty of disk space.
Any help would be appreciated.



i'm using vista home premium. when i shut down or do a restsart i loose
all
my restore points. never had this problem with XP. any ideas? i'm not an
expert so i expect there might be a simple tweek
Click to expand...

--
 
Thx julian,
I opened the event viewer and looked in the first folder "Custom Views" to
find Administrative Events. there i found loads of warnings and errors. some
errors are volsnap event id 25 (from around the times i was creating mannual
restore points and rebooting to test various 3rd party software).
when i click on the volsnap entry the following message appears below with
some other info.
"The shadow copies of volume C: were deleted because the shadow copy storage
could not grow in time. Consider reducing the IO load on the system or choose
a shadow copy storage volume that is not being copied"
I have no idea what this all means or how to reduce the load or change the
shadow copy storage.
is it something i could do if it was explained to me in very simple terms
considering that i'm just your average home computer user and never open
things like event viewer.
 
OK - I'm assuming you don't dual boot 'cos I expect you would have said so
by now...

However, I don't know that I can help much further execept with some general
observations...

Manual restore points, rebooting, testing 3rd party software... depending on
how much stuff had been touched this could perhaps explain why the allocated
space was used up. I believe Vista will take a Restore Point (apart from
schedule restore points) on installs and uninstalls, updates, etc., so you
could quite quickly fill up the restore point space... but you should still
have the last few left according to this scenario so I'm not quite sure
what's going on... unless it's other stuff that is being saved in
ShadowStorage also as a result of your installs etc.

Vista of all flavours takes shadow copies of files too - if you were, e.g.
installing an Encyclopedia from DVD and put it all on disk, then removed it,
a DVD's worth of files would probably have been kept in ShadowStorage...
possibly pushing out System Restore points. {Hence why I mentioned e.g video
editing)

As to the rest... 117GB free means Vista would have plenty of space to grow
shadowstorage into but... it won't normally take more than 15% of total
drive capacity. Let's say you have a 200GB drive, that would be nominally
30GB MAX for ShadowStorage - the actual amount allocated will be smaller
than that and the amount used will be smaller still. Sadly I don't know
about the "could not grow in time" consideration... and I don't know what it
means unfortunately; how you might manage IO during installs etc. is
unclear... maybe you just need to allow a longer interval before doing
more/initiating further activity e.g. wait until the disk light has stopped
flashing vigourously - maybe to allow transaction processing to catch up - A
Speculative Question I'm afraid.

Should you allocate more space? I'm not about to recommend manually tweaking
ShadowStorage allocations because I haven't tried it myself, but "vssadmin
resize shadowstorage /?" will show you the options and the syntax if you
want to do this... it could be worth a try but I would strongly recommend
googling the subject a bit more first. I believe that resizing will
effectively wipe current history, so be sure either that it doesn't or that
your system is in a good state or otherwise backed up if you do proceed.

That's probably not a great deal of help, but its the best I can do at the
moment...
 
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