System Restore Behaving Strangely.

Yep. Only the latest remain that I made before they were deleted again, so now I have a small list of points to choose from.

make another restore point again. Still only the latest remains?

putting restore points on another disk as you asked me, is stupid. an a big performace degree if it's possible at all.

Just for your info: you cannot put restore points of e.g. C: on other disks or partitions. Only in the server edition you can do that.

Regarding your problem: I would check the scheduled tasks (schtasks command) and see whether there is any possible culprit that deletes the shadows.

How much space do you currently have free on the drive?

siouxdax said:

Yep. Only the latest remain that I made before they were deleted again, so now I have a small list of points to choose from.

make another restore point again. Still only the latest remains?

So it's working again? What exactly did you do to fix it?

Okay, I increased the percentage of disk space allocated to System Restore and it's saving about the last six or seven restore points. In all of this time I never checked my other machine, a Toshiba laptop, and it had the same issue. I guess at one point I decided to only allow something like 5% disk space for System Restore on both machines. Maybe this is simply the culprit.

I'm not sure. My C drive is set to 5% and I can hold a dozen or so but the volume is less than 50% full.

5% is not a good indication of enough or not. Each restore point takes about 250MB to 1GB of shadowstorage - depending on the amount of data in the partition. So a shadowstorage of 5GB can be good for 5 shadows (restore points) or 20 shadows.

If you run this command, you will see how much is currently used

vssadmin list shadowstorage

And if you run that command, you will see how many restore points you have

vssadmin list shadows

Then you can compute approximately what size your restore points are and allocate the space for the shadowstorage accordingly. The command for that is (for partition C )

vssadmin resize shadowstorage /for=C: /on =C: Maxsize=xGB (where x is the amount of GB you want to allocate)

Note: if you make the shadowstorage smaller, you will loose current restore points.

Well on my desktop machine my C drive is 500 GB and I'm now giving it 15% (34.93 GB), but it's current usage is only 1.20 GB, I suppose since I've only created a few points since there were none. I'm going to continue to compare this with my laptop machine over the next couple of days and make sure we're in good shape.

Thanks so much for your help and input!