System restore points saved to recovery partition, possible damage?

Hello,

I have done a good bit of searching around the internet about system protection monitoring on recovery partitions.

It seems that by default system protection was turned on for the recovery partition of my laptop and many restore points have been saved to the recovery partition. I only realised when I was defragging my system hard drive that I noticed my recovery partition was 2% fragmented, which is odd seeing as it is never meant to be edited. I have never seen it fragmented previously. Since noticing this I turned off system protection for the recovery partition and removed the restore points from the system protection menu. I am assuming that the 2% fragmentation as caused by the saving of restore points to the recovery partition.

My question is that is the act of saving system restore points to the recovery partition going to cause any damage to the recovery partition itself or its functioning? Also if it is possible, would there be any advantage of defragging the recovery partition?

Thanks in advance to anyone who answers!

Ed

The only way that system recovery points would be on the recovery drive is if the drive was used for other purposes. Windows will not do this otherwise. Your policy towards the recovery partition should be a strict hands off. No modifications of it in any way. certainly not a defrag.

I also thought that there as no way to alter the contents of the recovery partition but according to the system protection menu, 3.47 GB of restore points were in use on that recovery partition before I turned it off.

What would your assessment be on the chances of this damaging or altering the recovery partition?

Its a Dell laptop. Just did a fresh recovery using the recovery partition and while I was setting everything up I noticed system protection was enabled and saving restore points to the partition. In this case no recovery disc is needed, there is a tool installed by Dell that runs the recovery partition if a recovery is needed. Also the partition is locked from my access, which is weird how windows can save 3.47 gig of restore points to it.

Back to my original question, I know it is wasted space but... is the act of saving system restore points to the recovery partition going to cause any damage to the recovery partition itself or its functioning?

I am not going to continue to save them to the drive, I am working if what has happened has altered the recovery partition in any way. Thanks

Good, I was worried in case the restore point files may have done something to the recovery partition. So we are sure it wouldn't have touched any of the files? How could it write the files to the partition if it has no drive letter though? I'm a little confused. Yes they do supply operating system and driver discs just in case the partition fails. Hopefully it never does. Thanks for your responses

Attached. Thanks for helping out.

Recovery partition marked as system and active??? I don't use recovery partitions, but that doesn't look right to me. Here's my Disk Management, with C marked as system and active.