Manual Delete Restore Points

[Disp350]

Trying to figure out how to manually remove system restore points in Vista
Home Basic. Whenever I try to delete them, I receive an Access Denied pop
up. In order to access the folder (and other folders that Vista does not
like you messing with), I gave ownership to the entire C drive to the
administrators group. This allowed me to go in a clean up all them temp
files that never seem to get deleted. I don't like to keep more than 5
restore points since it gobbles up disk space. Today there was 34GB of
restores in there. I used the System Restore applet to delete all but the
latest backup, but I want to manually control the amount of restores in
there. Can someone advise of a workaround?

[Carey Frisch [MVP]]

One cannot delete individual restore points. This is by design.

The way I would do this is to turn off system restore. Restart. Shut
down the computer for about an hour, including removing power to the
box. The start back up from scratch. Re-engage sys-restore after you do
a disk cleanup. Then make an initial restore point from where you are
at. Hopefully there won't be anything to go wrong during the process.

Why shut the computer down for an hour? All you have to do is turn off
system restore, reboot, then turn system restore back on. The reboot handles
it all.

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

You cannot delete individual restore points. The reason is that each restore
point depends on the other restore points to function properly. The best
option is what you already did, which is to delete all but the most recent
restore point.

You should not change the permissions, especially for the system drive.

You can delete all types of temporary files by using the Disk Cleanup tool.
Start/All Programs/Accessories/Disk Cleanup.

It sounds like your maximum size for System Restore is way too large. Not
sure how this happened, but it should be set to a maximum of about 10GB. You
can check the amount of disk space allocated for shadow storage with the
command prompt. As the maximum allocated size is approached, older restore
points will be automatically deleted.

Go to Start and type cmd in the Program, right click the cmd item and
select "Run as administrator" option. OK the UAC prompts.

When the command window opens, type the following.

vssadmin list shadowstorage
Press ENTER.

The result will show the current amount of Used, Allocated, and Maximum
allowed size for the Volume Shadow Storage on your system. The following
command will set the maximum amount of disk space used for the shadow
storage to 10GB.

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=10.0GB
Press ENTER.

(type the command as shown, including the spaces)
You should see a message that the command succeeded.

You can adjust the final value in the command to suit yourself. (ie: change
10.0GB to 5GB)

This command assumes that your system drive is C:

Print this message.

[Mick]

By default in XP, it was set at 10% of the capacity of the hard drive. In XP,
you could bring that down to a minimum of 400MBs. To have a look at it, click
on Start, right-click Computer, left-click Properties. then, have a look at
restore

It's my understanding that setting the shadow storage size is temporary. The
next time a restore point is created the storage size is set back to default.

To check the storage size use the following command from the command prompt.

There is a way to delete old restore points but you ll have to download a software called Tune Up utilities..go for 2009 version ..you will get it with serial key on piratebay.Its a great software to repair your PC as well as it has an option of deleting old restore points in the option "free up disk".

[Ronnie Vernon MVP]

The only values I have seen changed when retore points are created or
deleted are the Used/Allocated space.

The Maximum space always seems to stick.

Here is the result of some testing I did a while back. This is on Vista
Ultimate with a 300GB SATA drive. Initially, the maximum size was set at
40GB. I then reset the max size to 10GB and performed these tests over a
period of 2 days.
-----------------------
Before testing with 9 restore points available.

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.452 GB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 9.724 GB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 10 GB

-------------
After using Disk Cleanup to delete all but the last restore point.

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 610.781 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 900 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 10 GB

-------------
After one reboot.

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 629.625 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 900 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 10 GB

-------------
After creating one additional restore point (2 total).

Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 651.328 MB
Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 934.266 MB
Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 10 GB

[Nil]

Why are you responding to a thread that's more than three years old,
and was already answered to the orginal poster's satisfaction? Do you
think the guy is still waiting around to hear from you?

The correct answer was made three years ago. If you had been searching,
you would have found it.

If you were looking for illegally cracked software that's probably
crawling with viruses... well, I guess this was your lucky day! It will
keep you entertained for days or weeks while rebuild your system.

You mean like your post?

So - you consider a small company like TuneUp to be "greedy"? How so?
And you consider it best to steal their work, even though they offer a
free, fully-functional demo, and there are several other free and
effective solutions?

How old are you, anyway?

Nice dodge! You didn't answer a single pertinent question. I'll take
that to mean that you have no problem with people stealing things just
because they can, whether they need to or not, and to hell with those
who are trying to feed themselves and their families by the fruit of
their labor. Nice company line you got there - it's going to get YOUR
clock cleaned eventually.

[Dave-UK]

If you are looking for software to remove restore points then Ccleaner
has that option under Tools > System Restore.

Your dedication to protecting the financial interests of the greedy software
vendors is admirable. He can, however, simply DL a text file containing
serial numbers for use with the legit product and avoid the virus risk.

Old enough to spot a nitwit spouting the company line when I encounter one.
If you can't offer anything more to a person asking for help than making
remarks about the age of posts and other nonsense, why don't you put a lid
on it? If I want to deal with a wiseass, I'll go to the corner bar and do
it in comfort. But then, cowards like you never dare to spew your sarcastic
drivel face to face, for fear of getting your clock cleaned no doubt.

I can only echo BeeJ, as he says it all. Why don't you say something
constructive, or just keep quiet.

[sidoghosh]

hey Ccleaner is an awesome software .. i have used it but i didnt know it had a option to delete restore points..cheers for pointing that out!

[Peter Foldes]

This is how you manually Delete a Restore point
System recovery Option in Windows XP,Vista and Win 7 by Microsoft MVP

[Dave-UK]

I can't see where it describes how to manually delete a restore point.
Please quote the relevant text from your link.