Some more computer maintenance stuff
A while back, I made a post offering a tip for clearing up unnecessary clutter on your hard drive. Here is another one.
I found out today that System Restore eats up a lot of disk space. Now, I already knew that it was going to be eating quite a bit, but not nearly as much as I found out it was actually using. Before I cleaned house on all those unnecessary restore points, I saw that my both of my 640GB HDs were almost full. The D: drive had around 100GB free, and the C: drive had a tiny 15GB or so free. I'd deleted a bunch of mostly unnecessary stuff a while back, but then the hard drive just filled right back up again, for seemingly no good reason. This was bugging me off and on for days, because I just couldn't figure out what was causing it. Tonight, I decided to go all out to try to figure this out.
To start with, just to try to see what was going on, I selected every folder and file on the base level C: drive in Windows Explorer and brought up Properties on all of that, and it was only showing a total of like 330GB as being "in use." So... I wondered where the other 300GB or so had disappeared to. I started checking folders one by one, and that's when I noticed that the "System Volume Information" folder was hidden and inaccessible, and Properties on that showed 0KB in use, which I knew was a load of crap, so I figured that was the culprit. When I opened System Restore just to look at what all was there, I noticed about a dozen or so superfluous restore points. Yikes.
So... there are two ways to go about dealing with this issue, and I ended up doing both. First, I went to Control Panel -> System -> System Protection. In the dialog the comes up, under the "Protection Settings" section, I selected the C: drive and clicked on the "Configure..." button.
This brought up the System Protection settings for the C: drive.
At the time I first did this, it showed that my computer was using a whopping 50% of the drive for System Restore purposes. In other words, nearly 300GB of the 640GB drive. So, the first thing I did was reduce that to 20% from the 50% it had been using. Still, that was over 100GB being used for System Restore.
The next thing I did was run Disk Cleanup (as administrator), and then picked the "More Options" tab (which isn't there if you don't run it as administrator). Probably the easiest way to do this, at least on Windows 7, is to just bring up the Start menu, type "Cleanup" in the search bar, right-click on the "Disk Cleanup" result, and then pick "Run as administrator." Or you can just run it normally, then click the "Clean up system files" button, which will simply relaunch it as administrator anyway.
In any case, here's the "More Options" tab.
From there, I went ahead and clicked the "Clean up..." button under the "System Restore and Shadow Copies" section. That deleted all but the most recent System Restore point. As you can see from the second image above, that reduced the "Current Usage" from the almost 300GB it was at before down to a much nicer 13.20GB for me. Several hundred gigabytes were freed up between the C: and D: drives together.
If you do any of this, be very careful when messing around with System Restore settings, because you do still want to be able to restore your system if something goes pear shaped. So don't set the Max Usage percentage too low. But on the other hand, I really don't see the need to keep a dozen or more unnecessary restore points and have them be eating up nearly half of my entire hard drive, either. So yeah, if you notice that your hard drive seems to be overly full for no apparent reason, especially if you can't find the missing space, then it might be due to System Restore stuff.
I found out today that System Restore eats up a lot of disk space. Now, I already knew that it was going to be eating quite a bit, but not nearly as much as I found out it was actually using. Before I cleaned house on all those unnecessary restore points, I saw that my both of my 640GB HDs were almost full. The D: drive had around 100GB free, and the C: drive had a tiny 15GB or so free. I'd deleted a bunch of mostly unnecessary stuff a while back, but then the hard drive just filled right back up again, for seemingly no good reason. This was bugging me off and on for days, because I just couldn't figure out what was causing it. Tonight, I decided to go all out to try to figure this out.
To start with, just to try to see what was going on, I selected every folder and file on the base level C: drive in Windows Explorer and brought up Properties on all of that, and it was only showing a total of like 330GB as being "in use." So... I wondered where the other 300GB or so had disappeared to. I started checking folders one by one, and that's when I noticed that the "System Volume Information" folder was hidden and inaccessible, and Properties on that showed 0KB in use, which I knew was a load of crap, so I figured that was the culprit. When I opened System Restore just to look at what all was there, I noticed about a dozen or so superfluous restore points. Yikes.
So... there are two ways to go about dealing with this issue, and I ended up doing both. First, I went to Control Panel -> System -> System Protection. In the dialog the comes up, under the "Protection Settings" section, I selected the C: drive and clicked on the "Configure..." button.
This brought up the System Protection settings for the C: drive.
At the time I first did this, it showed that my computer was using a whopping 50% of the drive for System Restore purposes. In other words, nearly 300GB of the 640GB drive. So, the first thing I did was reduce that to 20% from the 50% it had been using. Still, that was over 100GB being used for System Restore.
The next thing I did was run Disk Cleanup (as administrator), and then picked the "More Options" tab (which isn't there if you don't run it as administrator). Probably the easiest way to do this, at least on Windows 7, is to just bring up the Start menu, type "Cleanup" in the search bar, right-click on the "Disk Cleanup" result, and then pick "Run as administrator." Or you can just run it normally, then click the "Clean up system files" button, which will simply relaunch it as administrator anyway.
In any case, here's the "More Options" tab.
From there, I went ahead and clicked the "Clean up..." button under the "System Restore and Shadow Copies" section. That deleted all but the most recent System Restore point. As you can see from the second image above, that reduced the "Current Usage" from the almost 300GB it was at before down to a much nicer 13.20GB for me. Several hundred gigabytes were freed up between the C: and D: drives together.
If you do any of this, be very careful when messing around with System Restore settings, because you do still want to be able to restore your system if something goes pear shaped. So don't set the Max Usage percentage too low. But on the other hand, I really don't see the need to keep a dozen or more unnecessary restore points and have them be eating up nearly half of my entire hard drive, either. So yeah, if you notice that your hard drive seems to be overly full for no apparent reason, especially if you can't find the missing space, then it might be due to System Restore stuff.