Setting system restore hard drive limit...

Outlawstar15a2 · Jul 14, 2009

Whats a good hard drive limit to set for System Restore for a 500 GB hard drive (Actually 455 GB as Vista took the other 45 GB for itself when it was installed.)

I have to take into account that the same space is shared between System Restore, Shadow Copy Protection, and Previous Version Backup.

And BTW what does Shadow Copy Protection and Previous Version Backup do anyway? Why are they so special?

DOA · Jul 14, 2009

Tough call without knowing more.
Assuming you have your data (movies, MP3, family albums, etc.) on another drive I would go 50G.
Another route I like for my gamer is to disable all the restore options and keep an up to date Ghost disk image. Often times it is faster to restore from an image with Ghost or Acronis than to repair an install that has problems. As long as your data is on another drive this works very well.

If that is your only drive, consider partitioning for boot and data.

DavidGP · Jul 14, 2009

Hi

Just to add in case you didnt know, setting SR size on Vista is not as easy as in XP or in the next version in Windows 7, you haev to do it from an elevated command prompt.

In order for you to manage space run (from an elevated cmd prompt, click Start > type in Start Search, CMD and when it shows in the search list, right click and choose Run as Administrator):

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=6GB (6GB is an example, recommended default value is 15% of your partition size)

I agree with DOA and I use Acronis to image/ghost my HDDs, but at times you may just want a quick restore, so minimising the amount of restore points is good, I'd say limit it to 50Gb with above command.

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Setting system restore hard drive limit...

Outlawstar15a2 Corporal

DOA MG's Loki

DavidGP MajorGeeks Forum Administrator - Grand Pooh-Bah Staff Member