Hidden Folder "_RESTORE" Taking up 28GB!

ELMO4635 · Jun 25, 2005

I was looking at my wife's home computer (she uses for work), and she was running low on hard drive space. It has an 80GB hard drive, and was down to less than 7GB!?! So, I started looking at folder sizes, and they didn't add up to nearly 45GB...

I started looking for "hidden" Folders and found one named "_RESTORE", and it is almost 28GB! it is backing some kind of back-ups daily of the system...

The folders is includes are:
ARCHIVE (contains FS6088.CAB hundreds of CAB Files...)
EXTRACT
LOGS
SFP
TEMP

What is creating these Files/Folders and should I turn it off or delete these Files??

Thanks!!

DavidGP · Jun 25, 2005

Well if your using either Windows ME or XP then its the System Restore function,

yes you can turn it off.. but then you loose the option of in the event of a software crash or bad install etc the ability to restore back to a time when the PC was working ok, you can however limit the amount of space used by System Restore or Delete all but the last Restore point thus recovering space.

Limit the space System Restore uses....
Open System Properties up and click System Restore > Highlight the drive in question and click Settings and adjuct the slider to however much space you wish to use for restore points ( personally I set mine to 1% which in my case is 1024mb )

Delete all but last restore point....
Open My Computer and right click the drive then choose properties > disk Cleanup > More Options > under System Restore click Clean up

but I would first reset the amount of space System Restore uses and the default is many GBs... then delete all but the last restore point.

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Hidden Folder "_RESTORE" Taking up 28GB!

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DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member