System Restore is a great tool for restoring your computer to a previous state if something goes wrong. However, System Restore can use up disk space quickly if you don’t use it wisely. Here are some tips to help you reduce System Restore’s disk usage.

  1. Use System Restore sparingly. Use it only when you really need it to restore your computer to a previous state.
  2. Don’t restore your computer to the same point every time. Try restoring your computer to different points in time to see which works best for you.
  3. Don’t restore files that you don’t need restored. If you don’t need a file restored, don’t restore it using System Restore. This will save disk space and speed up the restoration process.
  4. Keep your system clean before using System Restore. Make sure there are no unnecessary files or programs installed on your system before using System Restore so that the restoration process will run faster and use less disk space ..

Update: We’ve also covered how to limit system restore’s disk usage in Windows 7.

The utility to change the settings is a command line utility called vssadmin. You’ll have to open a command prompt in administrator mode by entering cmd into the start menu and hitting Ctrl+Shift+Enter, or right-clicking the command prompt and selecting Run as Administrator.

Show Allocated System Restore Size

Type in the following command into the prompt:

As you can see in the screenshot, System Restore is taking up 2.2 GB on my system.. and I just reinstalled!

Changing the Allocated System Restore Size

To change the maximum size on the disk that System Restore will use, you will need to type in the following command:

You can change the /for and /on to match the drive that System Restore is enabled on, and you can set a different size for the max size. I chose 3GB for the sake of this example, but you could also limit it to 500MB or something else if you wanted to.

If you have plenty of disk space, I’d recommend leaving the values alone, but if you are running low on space, this is a quick way to help the problem.