System Restore disk space usage can be easily configured using the slider control provided in the System Restore settings in Windows XP. But no such GUI option exists in Windows Vista. Windows Vista by default allocates 15 percent of the total drive space or 30 percent of the available free space (whichever is smaller) for Shadow Copy storage. Note that System Restore in Windows Vista is based on Shadow Copy, and thus it gets the allocated disk space information from the Volume Shadow Copy service. (The Previous versions feature use the Shadow Copy, as well.) To view or adjust the disk space allotted to System Restore you need to use the Vssadmin command-line tool included in Windows Vista.

View disk space used by System Restore

To view the used space and maximum allotted space for System Restore, first open an elevated Command Prompt window. To open an elevated Command Prompt, click Start, click All Programs, click Accessories, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as administrator. Then type the following command and press ENTER:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

This shows the allocated space for Shadow Copy for each drive in the system.

Note: If you use a non-elevated Command Prompt window to run vssadmin.exe, you’ll see the following error message:

Error: You don’t have the correct permissions to run this command. Please run this utility from a command window that has elevated administrator privileges.

Reducing the disk space allocation for System Restore

The default values would be sufficient enough for most people and needs no alteration, as most systems nowadays come with large capacity hard drive. If you have a small hard drive and you’re running out of disk space, then you may reduce the disk space used by System Restore using the vssadmin resize shadowstorage command. The syntax is given below:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[MaxSizeSpec]

MaxSizeSpec must be 300MB or greater and accepts the following suffixes: KB, MB, GB, TB, PB and EB. 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.

IMPORTANT: Resizing the storage association may cause shadow copies to disappear. And, setting the MaxSizeSpec value less than 300 MB will wipe out all the shadow copies, and thus clears out all the System Restore points.

EXAMPLES

To allot Shadow Copy 2 GB of space for C: drive, use this command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=2GB

To allot Shadow Copy 700MB of space for C: drive, use this command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=700MB

After running the command, you should see the message Successfully resized the shadow copy storage association in the Command Prompt. Optionally, you can verify the allotted space by running the vssadmin list shadowstorage command.

Related Posts


Email SubscriptionPrefer an E-mail subscription?

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

3 Comments

  1. Richard
    said this on Thursday, July 8th 2010 3:39 am

    totally worked, in windows 7. thx.

  2. rkbajaj
    said this on Thursday, June 24th 2010 10:17 am

    The max shadow copy storage space on my laptop(vista) was 14 GB. I changed it to 8GB. The free space on my hard drive was = 354MB free of 99.2 GB. And after the change, it is 463MB free of 99.2 GB.

    I was hoping about 7 GB space free on my hard drive. What happened here? Pls help.

  3. Nicholas
    said this on Saturday, May 22nd 2010 10:00 pm

    Thank you so much for putting this up. I hated seeing my free disk space slowly go down each day and not knowing what was happening or when it would stop.

    With this article and another one, I was able to delete unneeded restore points and set my own disk space allocation for the restore points on my vista. Thanks again!!

Leave a Reply