Practicing the Black Art (10/01
Controlling System Restore
by Vinny La Bash, vlabash@comcast.net
Member of the Sarasota Personal Computer Users Group, Inc.
Did a shareware application you were enamored of turn
out to be an unmitigated disaster? Perhaps a device driver installation,
system update or modification to a registry key went bad, and your
system wandered into an alternate universe. Windows has a utility called
System Restore that takes a picture, called a Restore Point, of your
system before certain types of operations are started. System Restore is
a very handy feature that allows you to go back in time to erase actions
you have come to regret. If a problem occurs you can revert back to the
way things were, and all is well again.
System Restore, for all its utility and convenience,
has its drawbacks. Some argue that if there is not enough free disk
space, System Restore will fail to create a restore point, so an
unsuspecting person may discover that there is no restore point
available when trying to put things back to normal. There is also no way
to make a permanent restore point that will not get deleted after a time
when automatic restore points need the disk space. This could be a
predicament if a problem is intermittent.
It is possible that System Restore may be responsible
for your disk drive running out of room. While today’s super-sized
drives make that less likely than a few years ago running out of disk
space could still happen, especially if you load up your system with
videos. You can reduce that likelihood even further by configuring
System Restore properly.
The snapshots we talked about in the first paragraph
are taken by a built-in program called the Volume Snapshot Service
(VSS). There is no way to access this utility in the standard Windows
Graphical Utility Interface (GUI). This means you can’t get to it with a
menu option. You need to open a Command Prompt window with elevated
administrator privileges.
Click on the Start orb located down at the
bottom left corner of your screen, select All Programs, and open
the Accessories folder. Right click on the Command Prompt
icon, and then select Run as Administrator from the menu. That
will open up a Command Prompt window with enough authority to configure
System Restore.
Before doing any configuration, let’s take some time
to understand how System Restore works. You can do this with the
vssadmin tool. At the Command Prompt type vssadmin /? (Press
Enter after typing a command.)
You see a list of all the commands supported by the
utility.
(Note: Shadow copy = Restore Point)
Enter the command vssadmin list shadows
This displays a list of all the restore points
currently on the system.
The list shadowstorage command displays the
amount of disk drive space currently being used to store restore points,
how much space is set aside to accommodate restore points, and the
maximum permitted size for restore points.
To see what’s available on your own system, at the
Command Prompt type:
Vssadmin list shadowstorage
Take a few minutes to understand the way the
information is displayed. If there is enough free disk space you can
store up to 64 restore points before Windows automatically starts
deleting old restore points to accommodate new ones.
Making backups is an essential task, but there is no
reason why Windows should be allowed to consume every available byte of
storage with System Restore points. The default settings allow Windows
to run amok but you can reset the maximum value with the resize
shadowstorage command.
Here is an example:
Vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize
= 12GB
The /for= switch specifies the disk drive where the
storage space is to be resized.
The /on= switch tells Windows where to save the
Restore Point.
The /maxsize= switch tells Windows how much space it
can use for Restore Points.
If you don’t specify a maximum size you are giving
Windows permission to do anything it wants. The minimum size is 1GB. I
have seen references stating that the minimum size can be as low as
300MB, but I could not verify that information.
After entering the resize command the system needs to
be restarted to take effect. Configuring System Restore points won’t
solve every problem you may have with Windows, but it will give you more
control of how Windows allocates resources. :
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Copyright 2010. This article is from the January 2010 issue of the
Sarasota PC Monitor, the official monthly publication of the Sarasota
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