Image your system with free Macrium

whs, after getting my homeoffice-pc's system imaging needs squared-away with Macrium I moved on to my wife's Dell XPS M1330 laptop. It is now all set as well, and I have moved on again, this time to my daughters laptop (another Dell, XPS M1530).

During my first look at her computer I found nearly 160GB of stuff (systems and user data); I used your tips from previous posts and turned off hibernation, adjusted the pagefile down to 2GB, etc. etc. With these changes and the deletion of some user data, I initally was able to reduce the size down to about 145GB. I plan on partitioning the hard drive and moving 24GB of remaining user data there. If your counting, that will get us down to approximately 121GB. She does have a couple of games, notably one that takes up 19GB of space. Excluding the game, that's still around 102GB of used space on C:, which seems really high to me.

When I look at the ShadowStorage (see snip), I see approx 67GB used of 69GB allocated. Would this be considered high (HDD is 462GB total), and is this possibly why the total used hdd space is more than 100GB?

I'd really like to tweak the size of her hdd down to the 45-55GB range (including the game), if possible before I image and store her system files.

Any insight or tips?

whs said:

Yeah, the shadowstorage is very high. Nobody needs that much. I would reduce it to 10GB. Run this command:

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /For=C: /On=C: /MaxSize=10GB

Done... THANK YOU!

This change should put me in the 55-60GB range of hdd used (including the games), once I repartition and move the user data.

I have just run vssadmin list shadowstorage and the results are

Code:

C:\Users\Alan>vssadmin list shadowstorage
vssadmin 1.1 - Volume Shadow Copy Service administrative command-line tool
(C) Copyright 2001-2005 Microsoft Corp.

Shadow Copy Storage association
   For volume: (\\?\Volume{87669c72-1fa2-11e2-ba5c-806e6f6e6963}\)\\?\Volume{87669c72-1fa2-11e2-ba5c-806e6f6e6963}\
   Shadow Copy Storage volume: (\\?\Volume{87669c72-1fa2-11e2-ba5c-806e6f6e6963}\)\\?\Volume{87669c72-1fa2-11e2-ba5c-806e6f6e6963}\
   Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
   Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
   Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.674 GB (6%)

Shadow Copy Storage association
   For volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{b8982f16-6a92-11e1-9d3e-806e6f6e6963}\
   Shadow Copy Storage volume: (C:)\\?\Volume{b8982f16-6a92-11e1-9d3e-806e6f6e6963}\
   Used Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
   Allocated Shadow Copy Storage space: 0 B (0%)
   Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.674 GB (3%)

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.674 GB (6%)
This corresponds to an original installation of Windows Ultimate + SP1 in a 25 GB partition on my Samsung HDD
This remains available as a fall-back should my SSD die,
but at the moment it has no drive letter and is not set as Active.

Maximum Shadow Copy Storage space: 1.674 GB (3%)[/CODE]
This is a more recent original installation when an SSD was added to my system.
It is again Windows Ultimate + SP1.

I have only ever used Macrium - never risked messing with Windows built in image creation / restoration.

Is 1.684 GB a standard default allocation until such time as Windows image creation is used ,
or am I exceptionally lucky to be set at 1.674 GB max and zero Bytes actual use ?

Please - don't hate me for being so fortunate :)

Thanks for the explanation of what uses that space.

Restore Points were always an inconvenience with XP and when starting fresh with Windows 7 I decided that I would rather use an image to either restore the whole partition of to mount the image and browse with explorer to get the previous version of a file.

A decision that I have never regretted

Regards
Alan