Is Vista Eating Up Your Hard Drive Space?

After playing around with Vista for a few months, I noticed that it is slowly eating up my hard drive space - and I couldn’t figure out where it is all going. A quick Google search made me realize that it uses a lot of gigabytes for ‘System Restore’. I rarely ever use this so it is really unnecessary for Vista to take 15+ GB for it - in my case. Here is what you can do to check how much space Vista is using for System Restore and to decrease it.

To check how much space is being used, go to command prompt with administrator privileges:

1. Click Start - All Programs - Accessories. Right click on ‘Command Prompt’ and click ‘Run as Administrator’.
2. Type the following in the command prompt:vssadmin list shadowstorage The results shown will be similar to this:

   Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 2.702 GB
   Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 2.933 GB
   Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 5 GB

3. If you feel like Vista is taking up too much space, then use this command to lower it:vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=[Drive Letter]: /For=[Drive Letter]: /Maxsize=[space]For example, I executed this command to lower it to 2GB:

   vssadmin resize shadowstorage /On=C: /For=C: /Maxsize=2GB

This saved me more than 10 gigabytes, which I can use to store more essential files on the hard drive.