The System Restore feature in Windows Vista is very important. Like on other Windows versions, it may help you to solve the problems if something goes wrong. So, it’s recommended to enable this feature on your Vista system.
Even so, the disk usage can get out of hand if you install a large amount of software. Basically, if you have more HDD space, you will have more space reserved for System Restore. And this is not good for sure. We can’t change the size of it like on the Windows XP, so we have to use below trick.
Open the Command Prompt
The utility to change the Vista system restore size (aka. ShadowStorage) is a command line called vssadmin. You will have to open a command prompt in admin mode by entering cmd into the start menu and right-clicking the cmd and selecting Run ad Administator from the dropdown menu.
Open cmd in Admin Mode
See How Much Space is Reserved Now
To see how much allocated space is reserved for the System Restore feature, you’ll need to type in the CMD window the following line:
vssadmin list shadowstorage
Show how much space is reserved for System Restore
You can see on the above screenshot that maximum space, allowed for System Restore on my computer is 60 GB! You want to spend 60 Gb on System Restore? Of course not!
Please note that this value can vary from your HDD space and overall program installed on your system. These results are based on mine 500 Gb WD Caviar HDD – on Windows Vista SP2.
How to Set System Restore Size on Vista
To change the maximum size on the disk that System Restore can use, you’ll need to type in the following command in this command prompt window:
vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /Maxsize=5GB
I’ve set the maximum size on 5GB, it’s 1% of my HDD space. I think that’s enough space for System Restore feature to work properly on my system. Of course, you can change it to whatever you want to.
Set system restore size on your computer
To see the proof, you can again type in the first command and you’ll see that Max. allowed allocation size for your System Restore feature is set depending on your value.