Indiscriminate Transgressions

System Restore uses a heck of a lot more storage than it used to, and there’s no way to set it from a dialog like there used to be. So, you have to use an elevated command prompt and do the following:

This shows you how much space system restore is using:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.593 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.807 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 11.178 GB

That’s on an 80GB drive, it’s a lot lot more if you have, say, a 300GB drive. In fact, it defaults to 15% of your disk, I believe. Anyhow, here’s how you change it:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=c: /for=c: /maxsize=2GB
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association

And then you can check your work:

C:\Users\kk.SINISTAR>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{e09c1639-86ee-11d8-a08c-806d6172696f}\
Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2 GB

For the size, you can use normal suffixes to set your size, (512MB, 2GB, 1.5GB etc.) If the Allocated Shadow Copy Size is larger than the new size you set Maxiumum, it will wipe out all System Restore information you have, so you’re vulnerable for a small time. It’s probably best to set a restore point immediately after this exercise.

Here’s one way to set a system restore point.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 24th, 2007 at 4:24 pm and is filed under Microsoft, Vista, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.