In my last post I spoke about how you can free up disk space if your Vista operating system appears to be consuming your hard drive space. As promised, here is some information on how change the disk space used.

One way to prevent that from happening is to turn off the automated creation of system restore points entirely but if you want to still have that fallback without all your drive space disappearing, there is a way to see how much space the system shadow copy is allowed to use and to change that limit.

This is a little more complicated because you have to use an elevated command window to do it. To open the elevated command window, do the following:

    1. Click on your Start Button
    2. Click on All Programs
    3. Click on Accessories
    4. Right click on Command Prompt
    5. Click on Run As Administrator
    6. Click on Continue to confirm

Once you have this command window open, you should check to see what your system is currently set to use for its shadow copy. To do that, you type the following, then press Return:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

This command will display information on each drive for which you have shadowstorage enabled. The last line in each set is the maximum size limit for the shadow storage. It’s typically set to be 10% of the total drive size but, in the case of a laptop I had running Windows Home Premium, it had that dreaded word – UNBOUNDED. Ack. Definitely something to change. If you have a very large drive, 10% of the entire drive may be a vast amount of overkill as well and you may want to reduce the max size.

To reset the size, from the elevated command window, you type the following and then press Return:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=c: /on=c: /maxsize=6GB

This sets 6GB as the max size for the shadow copy of my C: drive, stored on my C: drive. If you leave maxsize= blank, then the limit becomes unbounded.