System Volume Information

[rfdjr1]

I have a question about this folder. From what I've researched, it has to do
with system restore functionality. All well and good. But curiosity go the
better of me and I delved into the folder and find it take up an incredible
amount of disk space. Also, when I run a defrag, which I do about once a week,
using a program which is very fast and I can actually sit there and watch the
disks defrag, when it comes to this folder, it takes forever.

When I looked into the folder, I see threre sub-folders, each starting with
_restore.

One is 5Gb in size and has 8,879 files and 96 folders and says the date modified
is 9-14-08

One is 4.89Gb in size with 20,364 files in 358 folders and was modified 11-4-05

One is 22.8Kb and was modified 11-4-03 (not concerned with the size of this
one.)

My question is do I need both of the big folders? I realiize the 9-14-08 is
obvviously the most recent. But how about the 11-4-05 folder? I could use the
5Gb of space.

Thanks.

 

[PA Bear [MS MVP]]

I've been running WinXP on several machines for years now. I may have run a
Defrag session 6 or 8 times, total. You're not running Win4.x now.

See http://bertk.mvps.org/html/healthy.html and
http://bertk.mvps.org/html/diskspace.html

 

[Steve1A]

You can set the amount of space devoted to System Restore. Go to My
Computer/Properties/System Restore. You will see that you can select each
drive and change the Settings. This opens a dialog box where you can select
the percentage of drive space you will allocate for System Restore files.
After restart (maybe a few sessions), you will see the space used for the
System Volume come down to your Settings.

Of course, the million dollar question is "How much is enough?" I would
think a few hundred MBs or 1 GB is enough. Maybe others here have some
knowledge/opinions on this. But, to me, 4 or 5 GBs seems way more than
necessary to restore your system files.

 

[Twayne]

I have a question about this folder. From what I've researched, it

has to do with system restore functionality. All well and good. But
curiosity go the better of me and I delved into the folder and find
it take up an incredible amount of disk space. Also, when I run a
defrag, which I do about once a week, using a program which is very
fast and I can actually sit there and watch the disks defrag, when it
comes to this folder, it takes forever.

When I looked into the folder, I see threre sub-folders, each
starting with _restore.

One is 5Gb in size and has 8,879 files and 96 folders and says the
date modified is 9-14-08

One is 4.89Gb in size with 20,364 files in 358 folders and was
modified 11-4-05

One is 22.8Kb and was modified 11-4-03 (not concerned with the size
of this one.)

My question is do I need both of the big folders? I realiize the
9-14-08 is obvviously the most recent. But how about the 11-4-05
folder? I could use the 5Gb of space.

Thanks.

You can set the amount of space allocated to the System Restore
repository. Somewhere in System Settings; I'd have to look for it now.
It's huge compared to what most people need, but the smaller you make
it, the fewer restore points you'll have if/when you need them.
Also, by default System Restore is turned on for all disk drives. It
is ONLY needed on the boot drive for a normal installation, because it's
only the system portions that it backs up. It's just wasting space on
other, non-system drives, to have the space allocated on them.. I only
have it ON for my boot drive, turned it off for all the others.

Trying to edit the System Volume would almost surely crash all your
restore points, and would come right back to what it is now once it got
itself straightened out again. Remember, it only restores sytem files so
that's all it needs to work on is the system drive, and you can make it
quite a bit smaller and still have a few days worth of restore points
saved.

HTH

Twayne