Removing Win 7 system file use of paging file

DavidE said:

gregrocker said:

Question: On a drive where space isn't tight, what would be the advantage of trimming the paging file even with tons of RAM?

Some imaging programs include the pagefile (and hibernate file) and they can't be excluded.
With a smaller pagefile the backup images will be smaller.

An empty pagefile and hiberfile will be compressed in the image. So it is really irrelevant what size an empty pagefile has. Only if you clone you will get a full size page and hiberfile.

Microsoft imaging solutions already exclude these files. If using something else, you either exclude them by configuring the software to do so if the software is not already preconfigured to do so. If the captured image would indicate that the paging file or hiberfile was indeed captured whole, then reconfigure the imaging software (if possible), or use something else.

Technically, paging can only happen with an OS running, so if the OS is off the file can be skipped - it won't be "empty", per se unless it was zeroed out during shutdown, but anything in it can safely be considered useless for imaging purposes (unless the machine crash dumped and is rebooting, in which case the paging file is the memory.dmp file, and should be kept until after the OS reboots - and you should probably not be imaging that of course ).

I don't think you can exclude files from the image with Macrium. It is not in their features list.

Macrium Reflect FREE Edition - Information and download

DavidE said:

If anyone knows how to exclude files with Macrium free, I'd like to know.
I won't stop using it because I can't exclude files, but i would prefer these files aren't in the backup image.

I have 4-6 GB RAM and manually set the pagefile to 1 GB, so i'm not a good test case to see how much difference a LARGE pagefile affects a backup image file size.

Guess it's up to the OP or anyone with a lot of RAM and a large pagefile, to test if reducing the pagefile size makes a difference in the backup image file size.

Well personally I swap the pagefile onto a non-windows partition and it's a fixed size. There is a small 16Mb page file on the windows partition and that's the only pagefile that gets included in Macrium backup images of my windows partition. Additionally all page files are set to be cleared on shutdown.

BrassCat said:

Since returning to the page file, fixed 2gb, the file has of course reappeared (C drive). When checking on the fixed length page file, it shows a last modified date and time of when my system booted up, so indicating it has not been used except in booting (probably in initialization).

Incorrect - the file is (re)generated on boot, and there's a persistent handle to it from the kernel. Reads and writes to it are done via the memory manager, and they generally will not trigger an update to the file's date/time (I'm actually not entirely sure why that is, and I don't care enough to research it).

BrassCat said:

From reading the recommended website (from this thread) I am lead to believe that it will not be used until I exhaust my RAM resources first, and that has not happened.

Also not entirely true, but in general modified pages won't go to the paging file unless those pages are needed.

BrassCat said:

Thanks for the interest and responses. I will further modify the page file mode I will use. I will only allow the OS to create the page file when it needs to. My estimate now is that it will not be created, and if so only when I have exhausted the 24gb of RAM (Which I do not expect to do).

If you leave it at OS managed, it will generate and keep a 24GB page file, if your system has 24GB of RAM on boot. Your best bet if you're creating a system to be used for imaging is to set the paging file to the smallest amount possible (for both initial and max sizes) - this is usually a few hundred MB at most.