System Restore ate my hard drive

[Guest]

After two months use of Home Premium on my Dell XPS, System Restore had
consumed over 70% of my hard drive (250GB). I had to turn it off to reclaim
the space. Anybody else suffer this insult?

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http://windowshelp.microsoft.com/co...246&dg=microsoft.public.windows.vista.general

 

[Mark Veldhuis]

After two months use of Home Premium on my Dell XPS, System Restore had
consumed over 70% of my hard drive (250GB). I had to turn it off to reclaim
the space.

You can use Disk Cleanup to get rid of all restore points,except the
last one that was created.

 

[Qu0ll]

After two months use of Home Premium on my Dell XPS, System Restore had
consumed over 70% of my hard drive (250GB). I had to turn it off to
reclaim
the space. Anybody else suffer this insult?

You can configure how much of your disk space is used by System Protection.
Ronnie Vernon recently posted this useful information (Ronnie I hope you
don't mind me quoting you)...

If your maximum size for System Restore is way too large, you should
adjust this. By default Vista sets the maximum size allocated for VSS to 15%
of the disk size. With some of newer drives, this can result in a huge
amount of space being allocated.

Go to Start and type cmd and in the results, right click the cmd.exe
item and
select the "Run as administrator" option. OK the UAC prompt.

When the command window opens, type the following.

D:

Press ENTER

This will switch to the D: drive.

Now type the following command.

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Press ENTER.

The result will show the current amount of Used, Allocated, and Maximum
allowed size for the Volume Shadow Storage on that drive.

The following
command will set the maximum amount of disk space used for the shadow
storage to 10GB.

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=D: /On=D: /MaxSize=10.0GB

Press ENTER.

(type the command as shown, including the spaces)
You should see a message that the command succeeded.

You can change the final (MAXSIZE=) value in the command to suit yourself.
(ie:
change 10.0GB to 5.0GB)

--
And loving it,

-Q
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[Guest]

I tried deleting "all but the last Restore Point", but it made very little difference- I was still missing over 187GB disk space. Which leads me to ask: What does System Restore save in Vista that it did not save in XP? Rumor is that the Shadow Copy feature not available to me is still being stored, though I cannot retrieve it. Even so, I cannot imagine a backup that takes up almost 15 times the amount of data to be preserved.

It might also be worth noting that I needed third-party disk managers to
clearly detect where my disk space was going. Another large user is WIN-SXS.
Is there any way to control its size? It appears to retain files even of
deleted programs.
Thanks to all.
Paul DeLeeuw (pdl1)

 

[Guest]

Shrinking System restore makes it dysfunctional. Since System Restore also stores Shadow Copies (that you cannot see unless you have Ultimate or Business), the smallest that works is over 10 GB. Doesn't this bother anybody?