Home Windows 7 Tweaks Vista Tweaks Privacy

How To Customize Disk Space Used By System Restore In Vista

Posted March 31, 2009 – 11:14 pm in: Vista Tweaks

Advertisements

Recently, I showed how to know about the amount of disk space used by System Restore service and also how to create a manual restore point in Vista.

If you have followed my last post on System Restore, how to know amount of disk space used by System Restore, you may like to customize the amount of disk space being used by System Restore service. Note that Vista doesn’t allow you do it easily.

In Windows Vista, to store restore points, you need at least 300 megabytes (MB) of free space on each drive that has System Protection turned on. System Restore might use up to 15 percent of the space on each disk. As the amount of space fills up with restore points, System Restore will delete older restore points to make room for new ones.

Now, if you like to modify the amount of disk space being used by System Restore, or if you wish to allocate more/less hard disk space to System Restore, you need to follow the procedure given below.

1. Open elevated Command Prompt. That is, type in cmd in Start menu search box and hit Ctrl + Shift+ Enter to open elevated prompt. Alternatively, navigate to Start > All programs > Accessories, right-click on Command Prompt and select Run as administrator.

2. Type vssadmin list shadowstorage to know about the amount disk space used by System Restore. You can read my how to know the amount of disk space used by system restore for more information.

3. Next, type the following command to modify the allocated hard disk space.

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[Driveletter:] /for=[Driveletter:] /maxsize=[Size]

In the above command replace Driveletter with any drive letter and Size with the maximum amount of disk space that you would like to allocate for the particular drive.

Ex: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=F: /For=F: /Maxsize=2GB