Vista HP Users - Need Some Info on YOUR System Restore for comparison...

[Julian]

[Julian I-Do-Stuff - Some Vista stuff, but mostly just Stuff at
http://berossus,blogspot.com]

I - and I suspect many other Vista HP users - are suffering from having very
limited system restore capabilities (short history, just a few points)

With the help of Mark and a 3rd party utility from
http://www.shadowexplorer.com it has been discovered that my Vista HP system
is putting an awful lot more into ShadowStorage (where Vista keeps the
System Restore points) than it ought to (because unlike Ultimate etc. there
is no "restore from shadow storage" file/folder versioning capability in HP)

I would be grateful if, for comparison purposes you, could share the
following info on your vanilla Vista HP system restore points (as long as
your system isn't brand new and hasn't had time to try and accumulate much -
say for systems older than 1 month?)... if you could just bottom post and
stick the answers into the "colums" below that would be *most* helpful

Thanks in advance for your contribution/collaboration

Size of C drive in GB Current Number of Restore Points Date of
Oldest Restore Point (optional) How old is your system (months)
(optional)

 

[Julian]

Thanks to Windows Mail for messing with the formatting... so much for the
"columns" - I've rearranged the text

And if you are interested in more about what the problem to be solved is see
http://berossus.blogspot.com/search/label/System Restore

Size of C drive in GB...................................
Current Number of Restore Points...............
Date of Oldest Restore Point (optional)........
How old is your system (months) (optional)..

 

[Rick Rogers]

FWIW

Size of C drive in GB...................................111GB (74GB free)
Current Number of Restore Points...............18
Date of Oldest Restore Point (optional)........Feb 2, 2008
How old is your system (months) (optional)..14 months

System Restore set to default size of 15% of drive space. List ShadowStorage
shows 15.7GB used of 16.8 maximum space available, so a quick calculation
shows an average point is just under 1GB.

Keep in mind that if the volume approaches less than 15% free space, the
system will actively work to maintain this by reducing alloted space for
non-critical processes. Each point contains not only the system file
shadows, but also those of a user's files. If you have a lot of files, then
the corresponding restore points will be larger.

From your blog:

"Why should a Restore Point be much less than 2GB? Because restore points
ought to be only differences from the current system state, and if not much
is being installed, uninstalled, updated etc. the changes should be
relatively small."

That's not how vss works. It doesn't record only changes, that would be a
differential backup. System Restore is more akin to a "copy" of the system
at a point in time that can be replaced on demand. Each restore point is a
copy unto itself, and is not reliant on any other point, so each would be
expected to be appropriately sized.

--
Best of Luck,

Rick Rogers, aka "Nutcase" - Microsoft MVP

Windows help - www.rickrogers.org
My thoughts http://rick-mvp.blogspot.com

 

[Julian]

Thanks for the input Rick..

Re how VSS works - Doh! I see I confused myself <g> Clearly differential
backups w.r.t some nominal "full backup" in ShadowStorage wouldn't work as
the reference backup would eventually disappear (on a FIFO basis) and render
the subsequent "backups" useless.... I had a momentary vision of
"differential" backups being relative to the current systems state... pity I
didn't think a moment longer and realise that would be equally pointless -
I've acknowledged your point and amended my comments in the blog!

My Windows folder alone seems to be 9.79GB (!) (45k files in 8k folders), so
I can't help wondering how Vista works out what needs to be "copied"

 

[Mark]

Side note on the prior thread:

The "tool" provided (shadowexplorer) is basic in it's use, but I only
pointed to it because it does the one thing you needed:
What file(s) are eating up so much space that my Restore Points are
being deleted beyond the most current?
With that info you could exclude only that file from shadow copies. It
would be pointless to chase every file in the exclusion list and I never
intended that.

Since then, I've learned that this may also be a fruitless endeavor as
Shadow Copy would still make the backup, erase you other Restore Points for
any space needed, and THEN delete the file from the restore point (during
optimization) that was supposed to be excluded in the first place.

At my work, we disable shadow copies. Kind of pointless to have backups
of backups especially when you are paying for the maintenance of that
storage capability. We test the backup, extraction and restoration features
weekly. This makes me more prone to use backups as my means of restoration.

At home, I find System Restore points beyond one or two to be worthless.
If you go beyond one or two, you just don't know what you will end up with
for working applications if you are changing them frequently as I do. The
function Restore Previous Version, available by right-clicking a file or
folder is equally pointless except on the very rare occassion where you just
can't undo your editing of a picture or database any other way. (Imagine
restoring a single file within a driver to a previous version that makes use
of 50 files. What will it do now? Instead, you use the roll back function to
get all associated files to revert at the same time.) That said, I limit my
restore point area to 3GB. This lets me go back one or two iterations should
I ever need to and recover from a sudden disaster. (I haven't done this in
the years that the function has been available.) Instead, I accept that
going back beyond two iterations means a restoration of a backup. This is
apparently not an option in Home Premium unless you use third party
software.

Good luck!

 

[Julian]

Just in case anyone else is thinking of responding, the issue is now
understood* and further data is not required.

Thank you Mark for your input.

*"One line" summary: Behaviour by design; System Restore relies on Shadow
Storage but shadows of all files are kept in all versions of Vista, but
unavailable as "previous versions" in Home Premium/Basic. The space used by
file shadow copies limits restore point history. There does not seem to be
any way to have only System Restore.