Wonder why the Windows Vista system taking so much of space in your system drive? Well there are many things which can easily take up your precious space in your hard drive. Windows Vista new features, Vista search and also the backup mechanism so called System Resotre, and Shadow Copies are the main culprit in such issues.
Well we can choose to limit which folder or drive to have the Vista search features so that it minimize the indexing size, and we can also turn off System Restore easily if you don't really play with new drivers or applications everyday. Hence in my opinion it's extremely safe even without the System Restore. Shadow Copies is a very good and cool features which provided by Windows Vista. Imaging one day, you accidentally deletes a file or edited a file which you don't intended to, Shadow Copy can easily restore the files back in just a blink.
However, Shadow Copies actually occupied very large of hard disk space. In my scenario, I have a 40GB hard disk parition for Windows Vista alone, and Windows Vista "intelligently" reserve 15% of my hard disk space for this purpose. In another words, it's whopping 6GB of space.
Right click on my C:\ drive and navigate to properties, proceed to Previous Version tab, you can see that there is a long list of C:\ drive being "Shadow Copied". Initially I thought of deleting the old Shadow which I think I won't be needing it. However I realised that it doesn't not even have an option to do that.
Well... not to say that it donesn't have any option at all. Windows Vista actually do comes with a very good tools to configure the resize the amount of space that reserved Shadow Copy. This tools is called as VSSAdmin. Fire up this tools via command prompt under administrative privileges, and type vssadmin. 
To see how much space that Windows Vista actually allocated for the Shadow Copies, key in "vssadmin list shadowstorage" in the command prompt.
You can actually resize the amount of space allocated for Shadow Copies via vssadmin too. For example now, I want to resize my shadow copies size to only 3GB instead of 6GB, just key in "vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on=C: /maxsize=3GB" and immediately the older Shadow Copy will be deleted and release quite an amount of hard disk space.
Before shrink
After shrink
Hope that this tips can help you too. :)
1 comments:
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