Although they’re jolly useful, old restore points just sit there taking up a fair bit of hard disk space. (For those who aren’t aware of this useful feature, you can use them to undo harmful changes to your computer and restore its settings and performance to a state before the nasty change happened, without losing recent work such as saved documents, emails, etc.)
My System Mechanic defragging utility was having trouble defragging the restore files – it was taking ages. I couldn’t find out how to delete them safely until I wandered onto the ‘More Options’ tab from Windows’ Disk Cleanup program.
Here’s how to create (and restore) a System Restore point:
START > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > System Restore
Here’s how to get rid of all but the last Restore point:
START > Programs > Accessories > System Tools > Disk Cleanup > More Options (Then hit CLEAN UP under the System Restore section.) Voila. Less bloat and more hard drive space.
Thanks to tip subscriber Matt Lord for providing this tip.
David Risley is the founder of PCMech.com. He is the brains, the thinker, the writer, the nerd.
Another available option is to limit the size of the diskspace available to System Restore; therefore limiting the amount of restore points it can hold and releasing disk space for other things.
To do this; right-click on “My Computer” icon and select the system Restore tab. In the box select the disk on which you want to adjust the amount of space reserved for System Restore points and click “settings”. Adjust the amount of space using the slider. The default setting is 10% of your disk, but on disks of 160GB or more I find 5% is quite sufficient and a decent working amount. If you have a disk below 40GB I don’t suggest altering this, although having said that I have a 40GB C: drive and have 4% selected for System Restore without any problems YET.