Comments on: Reduce System Restore’s Disk Usage in Vista

By: annette

annette — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 21:43:34 +0000

my shadow storage only takes up 800mb, and the max storage is 2gb. i only have 2.64gb free on my 68gb hard drive. i moved all of my photos and documents to an external hard drive, where they only take up 10gb.
the only thing left on my laptop is my music library, which is about 9.5gb. i used windirstat to scan my computer, and it says that only 42.4gb of space is being used on my entire hard drive. there’s 25.6gb unaccounted for, plus winsxs is taking up 11.7gb. help me?

By: Mai

Mai — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 22:50:23 +0000

What are the implications of reducing my shadow storage from 4.4gb to 300mb?

By: ches

ches — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:53:49 +0000

Great Post.. I used winDir to show me the free space on my laptop hard drive and stumbled upon the unknown space taken up which was 10GB!!! It was the shadow storage all along
Thanx Again

By: shah

shah — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 06:32:13 +0000

Someone asked how you can do this in xp. Well as far as I know, you can’t. But what you can do, is go to disk clean up. Then go to the more options tab. There is an option to remove all but the most recent restore point. I had never done this before and I freed up 7GB of data. This can also be xp and vista. However, if you frequently make changes to your computer, or have lots of problems with it, i’d go against doing it.

By: John L

John L — Wed, 13 May 2009 11:14:15 +0000

I may have come to this rather late but an excellent piece of information. I’ve been trying to track down why I’ve been loosing about 2GB a day on my Vista system! Even WinDirStat wasn’t that helpful, But now I know. Thanks a lot

By: Jay

Jay — Mon, 04 May 2009 18:37:20 +0000

OMG you’re a life saver. I was going nuts trying to figure out why I was losing gbs of free space with no files to account for it. Thank you very much.

By: Dipak

Dipak — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:10:33 +0000

Nice tip..Worked like charm, I could recover 56GB on sony Vaoi……….Thanks a lot bro….

By: Javier Pino

Javier Pino — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 04:56:21 +0000

Answering Mike…

In my case, using the command deleted all my previous restore points.
Even though I created one last night. It got erased too.

By: Mike_in_Akron

Mike_in_Akron — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:28:41 +0000

Ok, I have one question: Right now I have like 20 GB full of restore points and I run the command to shrink it down to say 5GB… when I do this, does Vista remove the oldest restore points during the resize??.. just wondering before I do this.

thanks much

By: Sashidharan

Sashidharan — Wed, 18 Mar 2009 05:27:02 +0000

That was an excellent write up which is very useful..