After my last post about missing disk space, I thought everything had been fixed… only to watch it quickly creep back up to nearly full.One solution I discovered today was to restrict the amount of space reserved for system restore - open up a DOS (command) prompt with administrator privileges (normally you’d right-click on the shortcut and choose “Run as administrator”) - and then type the following command:

vssadmin Resize ShadowStorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=5GB

where /On=C: and /For=C: represent the drive where the files are stored, and for which drive - if you have only one hard disk, both will be C: - but if you have more than one drive, change /On to one of the other drives for better performance and security. /Maxsize=5GB is the amount of space you want to allocate - in this case 5 gigabytes.

Now that obviously makes sure that System Restore won’t take up too much space.

But there’s another problem - I have a Lenovo (IBM) ThinkPad - and it too has a backup program called Rescue and Recovery.  I had thought that this program was saving backups on a special partition - but it turns out that all the backups were being saved on my C: drive!

I read a few posts elsewhere, many of them simply recommending that you uninstall Rescue and Recovery and it will free up a ton of space - but this program got me out of a hole which System Restore couldn’t, so I highly recommend that you DON’T uninstall Rescue and Recovery.

Simply run the program ( Start/All Programs/ThinkVantage/Rescue and Recovery/Advanced/Delete all Backups) - and select ALL of the backups and delete them - or if your computer has been problematic, do a restore from the last backup and then delete them all - then create a NEW backup.

Now some of you might be thinking - how silly, I can delete all but the most recent backup - let me assure you that is a good idea only if you’re willing to wait many hours for the backups to be merged and the old ones deleted - trust me, I found out the hard way.

It will be much quicker to delete them all and then do a fresh backup -because Rescue and Restore does what is known as incremental backups, meaning that you usually can’t do a full restore unless the older backups are present as well.  So if you only delete some of them, it will try to merge them all into a single file and in my case that took an hour for EACH backup I wanted to delete.

Once you’ve done this - go into the scheduler and turn it off so that it doesn’t continue to make backups except when you want it to - and let Windows System Restore be your normal backup program - but leave one backup in Rescue and Recovery in case you cannot use System Restore for whatever reason (in my case, registry corruption) -  so that you will always have a failsafe.

Before you do your fresh backups - I highly recommend running a defragmentation program - the one which is bundled with Windows is terribly slow - thank goodness Lenovo also bundled a better program called Diskeeper - this will optimize all your files by cleaning up fragments and moving files towards the faster part of the disk.  Once defragging is done, then do your Rescue and Recovery backup - then a System Restore backup if you like.

Oh - and in case you were wondering how much space I got back… before deleting my Rescue and Recovery backups, I had about 89 GB used up - but after deleting the backups… 37 GB used.  The backups had taken up more than the entire installation of Vista and all programs and files!

One more point before I go - Rescue and Recovery may also be able to suggest which files you don’t want to back up - in my case they were huge downloads and a few media files, which I obviously don’t need to back up.  As for System Restore, you can tell it which extensions you don’t want it to back up (for me that would be stuff like .flv, .zip, .wmv etc. which is mostly stuff I can download at any time).

My computer is now nearly as snappy as the day I first got it (well, actually more, since the notebook came with SLOW Vista and I have since installed Service Pack 1 so now I have  JOGGING Vista… LOL…)