System Restore

[beemer66]

every time my brother does a system restore he looses 10 gig of his harddrive space. He is down to 9 gig.
it even takes the space if he reverses the restore
Please help

Thanks
BEEMER66

 

[lechtard]

Must cases when you do one it dosen't get rid of everything .. What I do when I do a system restore is go in and delete the partition, create a new one - then reinstall the OS.

Does he have a back up partition as well as a main partition ??

 

[damnyank]

Somthing sounds funky to me - I have not seen this nor heard of it.

Perhaps I should ask where you are getting the info that it is taking 10 Gig after every restore and not giving it back after you undo the resotre?

Perhaps there is something misreading something somewhere - if that makes any sense!

I usually compare my system information with my Norton System Doctor - as well as starting defrag and looking there for the free space on my harddrive.

Maybe, it's just a flakey reading?

 

[yoyo]

Never heard of this either. Does "he looses harddrive space" mean that there are new files or folders after a restore or does the drive simply shrink?

 

[beemer66]

yoyo his drive simply shrinks

 

[allan]

Have you tried emptying the recycle bin(s)?

 

[lechtard]

unless he has the recycle bin set to allow a large amount of files, it would'nt hold 10 gig.

It could be that he is reading it wrong - As the best way is what I stated above ... It will solve all your probs because what it could be is the data the restore is holding to take it back to it's last restore point, which is what I am betting it is - every time you do a restore point it adds data to the file making it bigger.

Does he restore a lot ??? and What OS is it ???

 

[beemer66]

the os is xp home
and it only started doing this 3 days ago

 

[Hipster Doofus]

Sure he hasn't got the kazaa virus or something similar?

 

[lechtard]

he could also have files on without knowing or forgetting they are there.

I still think it's the file point file size - If it's not that I don't know what it could be ..

 

[beemer66]

reformatted drive and reinstalled xp running fine now

cheers Lechtard
beemer66

 

[gonaads]

That's great that everything is fine now.
But the Problem is a strange one that we should still understand... I think that it is possible that he was making restore points in order to restore later. Any time you make a restore point XP will use up a fairly large amount of disk space (it makes an exact copy of the OS and all the Configurations and such). So the 10 GIGs is not to far off. That is probably why he was loosing HDD space.

 

[lechtard]

Posted by gonaads
That's great that everything is fine now.
But the Problem is a strange one that we should still understand... I think that it is possible that he was making restore points in order to restore later. Any time you make a restore point XP will use up a fairly large amount of disk space (it makes an exact copy of the OS and all the Configurations and such). So the 10 GIGs is not to far off. That is probably why he was loosing HDD space.

That is exactly what I said, but in a diff fashion

By the way dude - I love your Sig, it looks awesome

 

[yoyo]

Good that it is fixed, somewhat not so good that now we will never know what was the problem.
It is not true that restorepoints normally take that much diskspace. System restore doesn't make a copy of the OS, it only monitors the changes. The average size of a restorepoint is about 60 to 100 Megabyte.

 

[damnyank]

Right on Yoyo - the largest restore point I have ever seen was right at 1 Gig - after uninstalling and reinstalling SP1. My normal ones run in the neighborhood of 35 to 60 MB. There is a requirement to have 200 MB available for System Restore to function- so there is no way it would make 10 gig restore points.

I also was disappointed that a reformat/reinstall was performed - as we may never know the answer now!

Of course I am pleased the computer is working fine now - but I still wonder what was up - perhaps Hipster was on the right track with the virus idea?

 

[dave holbon]

Go here for hard drive space utilised: -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;300044


Or here for a basic description: -

http://www.spcug.org/reviews/bl0209.htm


The last time I tried to use system restore all the restore points were corrupt so be warned don't rely on this working!!!

 

[gonaads]

Posted by Dave Holbon
Go here for hard drive space utilised: -

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;300044


Or here for a basic description: -

http://www.spcug.org/reviews/bl0209.htm


The last time I tried to use system restore all the restore points were corrupt so be warned don't rely on this working!!!

Well from the info on the second link...

System Restore reserves up to 12% of your hard drive space for storing information on these restore points. On my 40GB hard drive I found 4.2GB of space allocated to System Restore. When I checked the number of restore points, I found that there was one every day for the past two months, more than 60 restore points. That seemed to me to be excessive so I reduced the space allocated to System Restore to 2% (637MB). That decreased the number of restore points to 18 days, which I believe is more than adequate for the way I use this system. Since I also use a backup program, which copies my entire hard disk, I don't think I need all the restore data that WinXP sets aside. For minor problems, it is nice to be able to "roll back" the system to the condition it was in before a change was made.

Maybe I was not mistaken as to the amount of space taken up by System Restore.

 

[damnyank]

gonaads - let me clarify what I was saying about the 10 Gig being too large for a restore point:

Per the text you quoted:
No matter how you cut it - 637 mb divided by 18 days (based on 1 restore point per day) = 35.38 mb per restore point.

Even If I had my reserved space set at 12% on my 80 Gig HD it would only be 9.6 Gig - that's total space reserved for System Restore - not for each restore point - thus I still say losing 10 Gig on a single restore point is pretty far fetched!

Hope this enables you to see where I am coming from!

Dave: As far as all your restore points being corrupted - totally possible - if you have(had) a virus. Once infected, you have to delete all the restore points after clearing the virus and then create a new starting point for system restore.