I recently visited a friend of mine who had a huge problem with his computer. His main hard drive was filling with data rapidly although he only had the operating system and some applications installed. It turned out that System Restore was using more than 12 Gigabytes of space on this drive alone.
System Restore might be a good way to give users the option to fallback when something goes wrong but the amount of data used is more often than less way out of proportion. You can check your System Restore settings by opening the Control Panel, selecting System from the links in there and the tab System Restore in the new window.
System Restore can either be deactivated for all drives, activated for some drives or for all drives. If it is activated the settings button will display information about the maximum amount of space which is 12% of the space on the hard drive.
You can find out about the space that System Restore is currently occupying by using Windows Explorer. Right-click on the System Volume Information folder and select Properties from the menu.
If you feel that the file size of the restore points is to big you could decrease the amount Windows uses in the System Restore menu in the Control Panel. Or, you could do the bold and turn of System Restore on all drives. I have it turned off since the beginning and I never had a problem.
To just get rid of all System Restore points is also easy. Turn off System Restore and turn it back on again afterwards. This cleans all System Restore points that are currently on the hard drive.
Are you using System Restore or do you prefer another method of backing up your files ?
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just discovered something odd.
checked the properties of sys vol info on c drive: 0bytes
d drive: 0bytes
external drive g: 891mb
what’s going on here, martin?
This means that system restore was or is still activated on that drive, did you check that ?
yeah, sorry, i should have included that info. it’s enabled on all three drives.
System restore sucks….typical microsoft!
Erunt is a much better alternative and a lot more stable!
http://www.larshederer.homepage.t-online.de/erunt/
I also think that System Restore sucks. I always disable it, because in my experience, it has always caused more problems than it fixes.
Thanks for the tip, i just found out that system restore on my computer used the maximum 12% of the hard drive. I toned it down to 1% and got back 6GB of free space.