System restore points problem re-visited

[Tom Tessier]

I asked this question before some weeks ago and never got a fix to the issue
so I'll ask again and detail a bit more.

My system restore points are automatically made but there is never more than
two to three points available normally only back 2 days. I do not have a
dual boot system and I am using Vista Ultimate. The only utility that uses
defrag is OneCare which I believe is designed for Vista as well as XP. I
have plenty of space on my drive (currently 40 gig of 78.1 gig on drive C).
And, no, there is no box to select which enables me to view older restore
points because there are no older restore points,. That box is only there if
you have older restore points.

Here is my best guess as to what is happening and it could be totally wrong,
of course. I understand that Vista will delete restore points when the use
of drive space exceeds 15% of available space. When I originally installed
Vista, my hard drive had much less space on it than it currently does. Could
it be that Vista is not resetting and looking at available drive space thus
automatically erasing old restore points as a certain size limit?

In any case, this is unacceptable to me. I would like system restore to keep
as many restore points as I have room on my drive up to that 15% of
available space. 15% of 40 gig is 6 gig. I would think 6 gig would be plenty
of space to hold many restore points.

Anyone have a work around for this Vista bug other than reinstalling?

Thanks,

Tom

 

[Terry]

On 4/12/2007 6:01 PM On a whim, Tom Tessier pounded out on the keyboard

I asked this question before some weeks ago and never got a fix to the issue
so I'll ask again and detail a bit more.

My system restore points are automatically made but there is never more than
two to three points available normally only back 2 days. I do not have a
dual boot system and I am using Vista Ultimate. The only utility that uses
defrag is OneCare which I believe is designed for Vista as well as XP. I
have plenty of space on my drive (currently 40 gig of 78.1 gig on drive C).
And, no, there is no box to select which enables me to view older restore
points because there are no older restore points,. That box is only there if
you have older restore points.

Here is my best guess as to what is happening and it could be totally wrong,
of course. I understand that Vista will delete restore points when the use
of drive space exceeds 15% of available space. When I originally installed
Vista, my hard drive had much less space on it than it currently does. Could
it be that Vista is not resetting and looking at available drive space thus
automatically erasing old restore points as a certain size limit?

In any case, this is unacceptable to me. I would like system restore to keep
as many restore points as I have room on my drive up to that 15% of
available space. 15% of 40 gig is 6 gig. I would think 6 gig would be plenty
of space to hold many restore points.

Anyone have a work around for this Vista bug other than reinstalling?

Thanks,

Tom

Hi Tom,

From another thread today (Diskspace growing 1 GB/day (or more)), a
user was losing 1 gig per day to SR. He resized it using a command line
prompt. Unfortunately, 6 gig won't "hold many". Here is the link for
reference:
http://www.watchingthenet.com/how-to-reduce-disk-space-used-by-windows-vista-system-restore.html

As I stated in yet another thread, MS should allow a configurable SR to
allow the user to save what is most important to them, not what MS deems
important.

--
Terry

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[John Barnes]

One way of testing that would be rather easy would be to increase the
percentage from 15 to say 30 and see if you end up with more restore points.
HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\WindowsNT\CurrentVersion\cfg and make the change

 

[Jill Zoeller [MSFT]]

Tom,

Check out our blog post at
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...used-for-restore-points-in-windows-vista.aspx.

Here's one point you might find interesting:

The determination of shadow storage size is made when the first shadow copy
is created (typically when System Restore is enabled and creates a restore
point during Setup) and is set to the minimum of 30% of free space or 15% of
the volume. When System Restore is turned on right after Windows Vista is
installed, the shadow copy storage area is most likely to be 15% of volume.
In cases where System Restore is turned on much later, the 30% of free space
formula might kick in, thus limiting the number of shadow copies you'll have
on your system. Also, these percentages don't increase or decrease
dynamically when more (or less) free space is available or after you adjust
the size of the volume.

Your suspicion is likely correct. The blog article gives the procedure for
viewing and adjusting your shadow copy storage area using the vssadmin
command-line tool (run the command prompt as an administrator to use this
tool, fyi).

 

[Tom Tessier]

Thank you very much. All three replies in this thread were very helpful. I
now have increase the size of my available space for restore points and it
is now not erasing them. I'm sure in a few days I'll have more restore
points. I'll play with the size to see how many restore points I want vs.
how much HD space is being used.

Again, thank you all very much. Much appreciated. You fixed my problem

Tom