Hard disk space

  • Thread starter Thread starter abcd
  • Start date Start date
John

Thanks for the background information. It all helps.


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Gerry

~~~~~~~~
Enquire, plan and execute.
Stourport, England
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Thanks Robert

That is helpful information.


--

~~~~

Gerry

~~~~~~~~
Enquire, plan and execute.
Stourport, England
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
 
Looks like there has been lots of discussion since I posted the original
message. I will not try anything for now till I find myself confident. These
days I am not finding time to play with the broken systems (I have sleepless
nights to handle our newborn first)

Guys keep your comments coming. I am reading those in my leisure time.

Thanks for all ur time.
 
Gerry,

I just referenced Ghost and TrueImage. I turned to TrueImage over a year ago
because I personally wasn't happy with Ghost any longer.

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Regards,

Richard Urban
Microsoft MVP Windows Shell/User
(For email, remove the obvious from my address)

Quote from George Ankner:
If you knew as much as you think you know,
You would realize that you don't know what you thought you knew!
 
Robert Blacher said:
That may work, but I don't speak hexadecimal
Click to expand...

Regedit can speak it for you :-) It allows entering DWORD values both in
decihal and in hex.
You can use the "vssadmin" command from an elevated cmd prompt to change
the amount of disk space system restore and shadow storage use.
http://blogs.technet.com/filecab/ar...used-for-restore-points-in-windows-vista.aspx
Click to expand...

Thanks for the tip. Actually I was looking for command-line utility to
control System Restore storage limits when I was answering to OP since it is
the way features usually presented in latest versions of Windows: there's a
somewhat limited UI and then there's a command-line utility for advanced
users (take defrag.exe as an example). But somehow I've forgot that
underlying technology is VSS and didn't think of vssadmin.
I used the "vssadmin resize shadowstorage" command to limit the space to
10GB on my 320GB boot drive. That seems adequate, at least for my
purposes.
Click to expand...

Here's the problem I see with manual configuration of VSS/Syste Restore: How
do you know how much it needs?

Are you familiar enough with inner workings of VSS to calculate required
storage for your usage patterns, space occupied by files and history depth
you need? I'm not. And since I don't want to be in the situation where the
older snapshot that I really need was deleted due to insufficient space to
store newer one, I agree with default storage settings.

Since, as I understand, System Restore uses "Copy-on-Write" shadow copies
(e.g. differential ones) the size of a volume itself is as important as the
number of files stored on the volume and the rate of changes to the files on
the volume.
http://technet2.microsoft.com/Windo...b7d8-42c3-b6c9-59c145b7765f1033.mspx?mfr=true
 
How much system restore/shadow storage space to allocate really goes to the
issue that Richard Urban discussed -- How valuable are backups that are made
at times when your system may or may not be stable?

In my case, I do full, image manual backups regularly to external USB drives
just before I make a major change and after when I am relatively sure that
all is well. In that situation, Vista's automatic but somewhat brainless
(no offense intended MS) system restore/shadow copies aren't all that useful
to me. At 10GB shadow storage size, it's maintaining about 5 restore
points. That works for me but might be all wrong for someone who had a
different manual backup regime.

Anyway, a useful discussion. Thanks.
 
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