the dwindling free space on my C

hello !
I am for ever fighting to retain free space on C (it's a 120 Gb SSD)
I deleted the hibernation file (thanks to some reading I did here)
and I keep trying to contain the restore points usage to 12% - it keeps jumping to 25%
when I reduce the alloted maximum usage, all my restore points get deleted... why ?

did it day before yesterday - no more restore points !
so I created a manual restore point, the current usage went to 82.03 Mb

today I noticed again that the free space on C had dwindled down
I checked the restore config - back up to 25% and current usage 25.31 Gb !!!!
for one single restore point ? :huh:

for I only have one restore point on offer : a window critical update dated today
so the manual restore point I created two days ago simply vanished ?!!!

if anyone of you can cast some light on this story, I would be most grateful....

What anti-virus are you using?

Run this command from a command prompt and tell us what it says:

vssadmin list shadowstorage

Or just post a screen shot of the command's output.

The last few lines of that pic shows that you have nearly 26 GB allocated to System Restore.

I'm guessing that's not by your choice and more than you'd prefer.

Avast has some sort of bug that causes this. There are numerous mentions of it on this forum and elsewhere over the last few months.

Last I heard, Avast knew about it, but no fix was in sight for several months.

You can live with it and manually keep deleting restore points and re-checking the amount allotted to System Restore within the Windows interface.

Or you can say goodbye to Avast.

Or wait for the fix.

You might be able to get more current info by prowling the Avast forum.

ignatzatsonic is correct; Avast is known for this problem.

The Avast forum might have a fix by now. It's been a few weeks that this problem has been around.

icacream said:

in the meantime can you tell me what is the normal space a restore point should use
I mean, the one I created manually used 82 Mb - does this seem as it should to you ?

Click to expand...

82 mb seems very small to me. I suppose it's possible.

I allot 7 gb to System Restore and at any given moment I have maybe a dozen restore points--so each restore point takes up roughly 1/2 gb.

Do you have very little occupied space on your C partition? I have 37 gb occupied on C.

Can you in fact restore that 82 mb restore point?

I set my Restore Points to 5 % of the drive space. It gives me lots of restore points without using a lot of drive space. At the present time I have 20 Restore Points.

The problem is caused by the Avast Secure Virtual Machine tool, which is also known as Sandbox or Avast NG.
This tool should not be available in the free version, but an Avast program update somehow installed it for me.
I uninstalled it.

Go to Control Panel > Programs and Features
Select the Avast program in the list and click Change
If you have Secure Virtual Machines checked, uncheck it and continue to uninstall it.
Uninstalling it should fix the problem so Avast won't change your Restore Points and max usage.

Here is what I have installed for Avast (nothing but the basic shields).

Thank you DavidE for the information. That will be handy information for many.

ignatzatsonic said:

Do you have very little occupied space on your C partition? I have 37 gb occupied on C.

Can you in fact restore that 82 mb restore point?

Click to expand...

I have 49.8 GB free of 111 GB on my C drive
I cannot restore that 82 mb restore point as, as I mentioned yesterday, it vanished

stranger, I changed avast as DavidE suggested, yet did not restart my computer (as requested)
but the space in current use for restore points went from the 25.31 GB I reported yesterday down to 5.87 GB
BUT the restore point which had been created by a win update yesterday has vanished !
I only have two system restore points created by avast just now !
now, why should yesterday restore point have vanished, the allocated space is still set at 27.89 GB
I am puzzled ! :shock:

DavidE, thanks for the reminder! I totally forgot to UNcheck during custom/advanced install what I don't want. One done, two more to do when I get home.

Addendum: I'm guessing Secure Virtual Machines is a subset of Sandbox. Sandbox is gone from all my Avast programs.