Vista - System Restore - disk space

Hi When i ran this I got these stats

Used .... Storage Space: 42gig
Allocated.....: 43gig
Maximum.....: 54 gigs


What would be a good amount to reduce this to?

Hi bluesinjid,

It depends how many restore points you want to keep.

Many are happy with 3gb.

If you are not sure, try 10gb first and see how many restore points are still listed.

If you like , you can then change it to a smaller amount.

Hope it helps.

Thanks I tried 7 gigs and holy Sh**!! You saved me some 40 gigs of HD space! I really love your tuts here! :0


Cheers

I looked at the 1st page of this thread and immediately thought I had the same problem. My hard drive is 160 gigs (the C disk in Computer says 138). So I went to Command Prompt and checked out my System Restore disk space and the Max was 20.842 gigs. Unlike some of the earlier posts, which had the Used Shadow Storage around 10% of the max space, mine had a Used Shadow Storage space of 19.711 gigs.

1. Why is my used space so large and so close to the Max space?


PS. The C disk in the Computer says I have 8.94 gigs left out of 138 gigs.


2. I don't really know much about computers, but I think this problem is related to why my disk space doesn't add up. I go into C: and highlight everything, and then click Properties. It says 103 gigs. Even with hidden files showing it says only 105 gigs. But the Computer says my C: is 138 gigs. Even with the 8.94 of free space (as I stated above), that leaves a difference of 24 gigs. Why is this 24 gigs gone; is it related to the System Restore storage space?

Hello hahanotfunny, and welcome to Vista Forums.

By default Vista allocates 15% of your hard drive's size to storing System Restore points.

Your hard drive size is different because they advertise it using the higher looking decimal number when the actual size is the smaller binary number. This would be why your drive is actually smaller than 160 GB.

Drive Size	Approximate Total Bytes	Decimal Capacity (bytes/1,000,000,000)	Approximate Binary Capacity (bytes/1,073,724,841)
160 GB	160,000,000,000	160 GB	149.01 GB

Hope this helps,
Shawn

Dj, you have plenty of space on your disk. Unless you really need the extra space now, I would not reduce the shadowstorage. In the event of a serious problem, you never know how far back you have to go to restore the system. Very often problems do not show up immediately and may require to go back a couple of weeks.
The amount of shadowstorage used is also a function on how much and how often your system is being changed with new installations or updates. With every install, a shadow is being written plus normally one per day. At about 1GB per shadow, that can eat up the shadowstorage pretty fast.
In addition to the recovery with the shadows I recommend to use an imaging program such as Norton Ghost, Acronis or Macrium. I use Ghost and write a system image to an external disk once a week on Sunday. That allows me to go back to my system state of last Sunday at any day of the week. For the "in between" days, I allocated 30GBs of shadowstorage so that I can also go back to Tuesday or Thursday and don't have to lose 3,4,5 days of work.
If you are interested in that approach, you might want to read this: Ghosting approaches - summary because of popular demand « How-To Geek Forums

Ummm, why is my computer using so much of the max space allowed for Shadow Storage? And if I wanted to decrease the max space allowed, what is a good size?

(How much space does each restore point take up?)

A good size is as much as you can afford. Unless you need the space urgently, I would not reduce it. Each shadow needs about 1GB and figure 10 to 15 shadows per week (one each day and one with each program or update installation). I keep 30GBs on my disks, but I also make a system image once a week (see my post above).

I chaged it from 137GB to 30GB?

I was always wondering why my storage was being used so fast.

Should it be more or less? Thanks for the great post

Hello Kevin,

I would say that it depends on how many restore points that you want to have stored. On average each restore point is 1 to 2 GB, and they will not stay stored longer than 90 days. 137 GB is excessive, but 37 is ok if you have the extra hard drive space and want to have extra restore points.

Hope this helps,
Shawn