Change the amount of space used by System Restore

Mon, 03/12/2007 - 15:19 — Ciprian

System Restore is a very useful feature of Windows Vista but it has one main drawback. After running for a few weeks, it can use a lot of your hard disk space. With the default settings turned on, System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. For example, if you have a 250GB hard disk drive, System Restore might end up using 37,5GB of it. That is a lot of space.

What can we do to limit the amount of space used by System Restore? In Windows XP making this kind of configuration was pretty easy. You had a slider in the System Properties window that you could move left or right to the desired percentage. Unfortunately this slider was removed from Windows Vista.

In order to configure the amount of space used by System Restore, you need to use a tool called Volume Shadow Copy Administrative Command-Line Tool (or vssadmin.exe).

To access vssadmin.exe we will have to open the command prompt with administrative rights. In order to do that, type "cmd" or "command" in the Start Menu search field. The first result should be cmd.exe or the Command Prompt. If you have UAC turned on, right click on it and select Run as administrator.

Start Menu

The Command Prompt will open. The Volume Shadow Copy Service offers several configuration option. Type vssadmin /? and press Enter to see the list of available options.

If you want to know how much space has been allocated and the maximum amount of space that can be used by System Restore, type vssadmin list shadowstorage and then hit the Enter key.

vssadmin

If you want to change the amount of space used by System Restore, you should use the following command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive letter]: /For=[drive letter]: /Maxsize=[maximum size]

MaxSizeSpec must be 300MB or greater and accepts the following suffixes: KB (for kilobytes), MB (for megabytes), GB (for gigabytes), TB (for terabytes), PB (for petabytes) and EB (for exabytes). If a suffix is not supplied, MaxSizeSpec is in bytes. If MaxSizeSpec is not specified, then there will be no limit to the amount of space it may use.

For example, if you want System Restore to use a maximum of 1GB of space for the restore points on drive "C:", you should type the following:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=1GB

vssadmin

The maximum space used by System Restore has now been resized.

Comments

Thu, 07/23/2009 - 18:45 — Paul B (not verified)

Resize clears the restore data

If you resize to a smaller value than your current used space, it clears all the restore data.

i.e.: I had 4.776GB of 8.0GB of shadow storage used. I changed my Maxsize to 500MB. When I checked the space used it was 0.

Thu, 07/30/2009 - 23:27 — Brab (not verified)

Allowcation of of ShadowStorage

I've been able to increase the shadow Storage to a Maxium figure, but
I can't find any information of how to change the allocation of storage.
My allocated storage space is zero.
Which is surely the reason System Restore is not working on my machine.
Can any one help. Thankyou

Tue, 10/06/2009 - 03:12 — Anonymous (not verified)

Thank You

Wow, excellent. I was skeptical at first: commandline? Microsoft really must not want us tampering with this. I didn't think this was the reason 12 GB of my disk space went missing *immediately* after deleting it; I thought it was Explorer glitching (it glitches all the time... free disk space fluctuates faster than I can access my harddrive), but then I read the comments about how people saved 12 GB, 55 GB, 80 GB!!! I took some before-and-after screen shots and followed your steps and I got 12 GB back!!!! Now I have 23 free GB left, as I should have! If I hadn't done this now, I would've lost up to 24GB and been broke once more!!! I'm gonna have to forward this everyone I know!!!! Shifty Microsoft. For the longest time I thought I just kept putting very large files to the hard drive and forgetting about them!!! No. I'm not insane -- MS is just plain stupid!!! (btw I resized it to 4GB)

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