Cleaning up my HD
Monday, September 10, 2012 by Philly0381 | Discussion: Personal Computing
Have a question about my harddrive and a big section that is unmoveable info/files. After some research I believe it relates to System Restore Points. Here is a screenshot of what I'm looking at:
I want to keep restore points but I'm thinking that this is probably too many. I'm running Windows 7 64 bit. So my questions is what is the rule for how much space to allow and where do I make that adjustment? I do weekly backups of the harddrive when I do my computer maintenance.
Thanks in advance for any and all help. 
Reply #2 Monday, September 10, 2012 12:24 PM
Thanks davyandjane that was very helpful it identifying where to adjust the amount of space for restore points.
Just need to figure out now how much space will be enough. 
Reply #3 Monday, September 10, 2012 12:40 PM
I don't recall what the setting is by default in Win7 but I have mine set for 5GBs. I use CCleaner to delete the older ones after a while. Usually, I keep 3 - 5 restore points and make one manually just before installing any untried software.
By default in Vista, it is set for 15% of your HDD capacity or IIRC, 30 restore points, then it overwrites the old ones. For a 1TB harddrive that's 150 GBs if they are allowed to accumulate. Wasted space, there is no need to go back that far.
Reply #5 Monday, September 10, 2012 12:53 PM
Another tip. Dump all your old restore points before you back up or defrag, it will save a lot of time and storage space. 
I use SmartDefrag also, good software.
Reply #6 Monday, September 10, 2012 1:01 PM
Thanks once again Wizard, I use CCleaner and totally overlooked the option to delete older restore points. Duhhhhh. 
Do you think it necessary still to go into the system and adjust the amount of space for restore points or just use CCleaner to delete the older ones?
Reply #8 Monday, September 10, 2012 1:41 PM
Unmoveable files are also going include parts of the registry, the page/swap file, and (for laptops) the hibernation file.
The last two, pagefile.sys & hiberfil.sys, can be a several Gb in size as they're extending or backing up RAM.
The more physical memory you have, the larger these files tend to be.
As these files are always in exclusive use by the kernel, then no other user-mode process can defragment them.
I would have thought that you should able to defrag restore point data as it shouldn't be in continuous use by the system, I could be wrong though...
Reply #9 Monday, September 10, 2012 3:07 PM
Set Smartdefrag to do a Boot Time Defrag (after deleting unwanted restore points) and it will move those files for you.
Reply #10 Monday, September 10, 2012 3:19 PM
Thank you for that bit of info Lantec.
Surprising how we can have software on our computer and not know of or use all of their capabilities.
I just knew I would get good information by posting a thread in the forums, thanks everyone for your replies and help.
Reply #11 Monday, September 10, 2012 4:44 PM
But I don't wanna do this on an SSD, correct?
Reply #12 Monday, September 10, 2012 4:50 PM
I thought I saw somewhere that you don't defrag an SSD, I think it was on your other thread about SSDs.
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Reply #1 Monday, September 10, 2012 12:07 PM
Try this
http://mintywhite.com/windows-7/7maintenance/change-limit-system-restore-windows-7/