It was possible to define the percentage that the System Restore feature in Windows XP allocated from a hard drive. Windows Vista has System Restore build in as well but no obvious way to define the percentage of the hard drive that System Restore allocated. Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to hide the setting well and allocate 15% of the hard drives capacity to System Restore. On a 300 Gigabyte drive System Restore would allocate 45 Gigabytes of space !
In their drive for a uncomplicated system they restrict user possibilities to create a system the way they like. It is becoming a closed system with the owner of the computer being a user instead of someone who can actively alter his system the way he wants. To change the System Restore size in Microsoft Windows Vista you have to rely on the command line utility vssadmin.
Open the command line and use the following command to change the size of System Restore in Windows Vista:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=4GB
This would change the allocated size of System Restore on drive C: for drive C: to 4 gigabytes. Please note that the on: parameter is the drive letter where the System Restore files are stored while the for: parameter defines the drive that the files should be backed up from. The maxsize parameter is pretty obvious. It can’t go below 300 Megabytes. If you remove the maxsize parameter the settings will be changed to the default ones again.
If you select a size that is lower than the current amount of space the oldest entries in System Restory will be deleted first.
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thanks thanks thanks!
as an additional question how much space do the vista require for 1 restore point (as an estimation- 300MB or 1GB or what?)
In Windows XP, the space allocated for system restore
is a maximum allotment and not a restriction
of the use of any space on the hard drive.
I suspect the same is true for Vista.
One would not have to worry about Vista taking up
15% of space for system restore unless there
are enough system restore points over time
accumulated adding up to that amount.
On my Windows XP Professional system with
over 100 GB of data a single restore point
takes up 75 MB of space and I maintain only
a few restore points at any given time.
Thank you for providing this. It really annoys me how Vista hides settings like this. New restore points are created EVERY DAY by default on vista with no clear way to change that either.
15% space will be used within a few weeks no matter what you do with computer (unless you change the setting of course). Absolutely ridiculous. Maybe the HD manufacturers had a word with MS? Did they want to force more sales by cleverly shrinking the size of everyone’s disk by 15%?
Anyway, I’ll go ahead and use your tip. Thanks!
What a surprise: on my 100GB notebook disk the free space went from 15GB to 29GB as soon as I changed the max to 3GB.
I’ve only been using the restore utility for a week, so that tells you how quickly it fills up.
Much better.
thanks for the advice i just recovered 23gig of space on my hd…..thank you very much..:-)
Thank you so much… i have been turning insane trying to figure out where my free space has gone. you are saviours, thank you.
I also want to thank you for explaining things clearly. I was trying to figure out why I had 122gb used on a 455gb hd (500gb), when files only added up to 68gb. The net amount of 55gb is roughly 12% of my 455gb drive, within (but approaching) the 15% allocation you described.
I agree with your assessment of folks becoming users rather than ‘controllers’ of their computers, as less and less customization becomes available. This does protect against people hopelessly tangling themselves up with ‘system fixes’; but it also turns us into rather passive users, who often can’t find answers to legitimate questions (like this one: ‘where’d my disk space go?’)
Gracias. Bill S.
Hi all
My problem started when i did a system recovery, I did the recovery everything went back to be nice and new and i started installing my firewall etc and world of warcraft when i happened to notice my harddrive saying 10.1gb of 48.8gb free!!!
Im a little confused by it all and dont know whow to do what yous aid i ran the command line on the c drive and i get the error
you dont have the correct permission to run this utility from a command line that has elevated admin access??
I really am lost but on top of it all my hd is supposed to be 80gb so i have lost 30gb straight away and on top of it the 50gb it has given me only has 10gb space free, please help i am close to throwing the tower out of the window as i have had no end of problems with it
Help would be much appreciated
Yeah thanks now i can have more free room only using 40% instead of only 25% + System Recovery. of my hard drive space because it increases the life time of the HD by 300% especialy i had only 512 MB instead of the 4GB i have now.
The more Ram the bigger the lifetime of the HD
Yeah,talking about lost disk spaces…I’m using a 1tb harddrive for my system. Then one day I found I lost more than 100gb for no reason…
Hi, thanks for the tip!
But I have two drives, C and D. Do I need to limit the D drive as well?
Thumbs up for post, thumbs down for vista and Microsoft, as usual.
What a great help. I just purchased an Acer 1410 netbook/laptop with a 250 GB drive. Twenty GB used by hidden drive. C drive indicated a 220GB size but after two weeks and installing only a few basic programs (program folder showing 4+Gb and Windows at 16GB the usable space was now showing 160GB. I spent much time trying to account for the loss.
Many thanks to you for offering the solution.
Dennis
System restore only holds restore points for up to 90 days, therefore, System Restore can take a lot of space if you frequently install/uninstall, and create restore points. To have System Restore take up around 10 GB of space… well I don’t know what you’re doing with your PC. And even if it does, after 90 days of its creation date, it’ll be gone.
To answer The PC Tech Guy above…
You will lose the space if you restore from those “idiot disks” provided by most PC manufacturers these days. Why? Because when you update using Windows Update, it sets a restore point on all the updates. I just went through that and found my 300 GB drive 31% full. I turned off system restore when done updating and watched it drop to just 17%. And this is before any of my external software was installed. Now I don’t know about you but I don’t think the loss of 14% of my drive, even if it is for 90 days, is a good thing.
So thanks Martin for showing me how to limit the size of that beast!
My sincere thanks for this incredibly helpful bit of information. I have tried various means of cleaning up my mysteriously shrinking hard drive, and was told that I needed to shrink the system restore space. I thought I fixed the problem a few months ago, but it came back, and the cmd prompt here did the trick. Well done!