Resizing System Restore's Allocated Space

[Veedems Veteran]

I enjoy having system restore on since it has helped a few times in the past. The problem in Vista, with System Restore, lies in the fact that there is no option, via the UI, to decide how much of your HDD space should be allocated to the feature. I found this online which may help some people if they wish to change it. To start, you have to run the command prompt with elevated privileges (Run as administrator) then type the following:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

which will list something like this:

vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool

© Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association

For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{db8e056a-6294-11db-9f9f-806e6f6e6963}\

Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{db8e056a-6294-11db-9f9f-806e6f6e69

63}\

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 197.766 MB

Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 400 MB

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 2.092 GB

Now, for me, on an 80GB HDD, Vista has dedicated a rather large 11GB to System Restore. Using the following command, I resized it to a more respectable 5GB:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=5GB

Full credit belongs to: http://vistasupport.mvps.org/decrease_stor...tem_restore.htm