Windows 7: System Restore causing heavy disk use after several years. Why now?

I have had a Windows 7 desktop system running at home for several years. In just the last few weeks, I noticed very slow system performance and noticed the disk usage light was on pretty much constantly.

So I started looking at Resource Monitor and found that all the excess disk usage was due to pid 4 and using file names all starting with “System Volume Information”. See the screen shot below.

With a little research I found this was all due to the System Restore feature. When I disabled SR, the heavy disk use stopped and my performance returned to nice and snappy.

My question though is why now after several years did System Restore start causing problems? I have never touched the SR setting before. It never seemed to cause problem before.

no one?

Check Task Scheduler.

Task Scheduler - look under Microsoft \ Windows \ SystemRestore in the left-hand pane.

Highlight SytemRestore and check "Triggers" in the right pane to see how often restore points are scheduled to be created.

Hi Rhodes,
most of us here tend to use a system image for backup purposes,
either Macrium or Ameobi.

That doesnt answer your problem thou,
Anything changed system wise about the time this started, if not .
Have you had a problem with with windows updates failing,
close to filling up your memory.
New SSD hard drive
Are you infected, (virus/malware)
(run a scan using Malwarebytes free, uncheck trial, enable rootkit detection via dashboard>settings)

Depending on your requirements you could reduce/increase the size of the system restore option

Roy

really the only thing that was different was I started using a Syslogy NAS drive a few weeks before for backup synchronizing among other things. I thought maybe it was the Synology causing all the disk use but as posted it was System Restore. So unless the Synology triggers constant SR's, it doesn't seem to be due to the NAS.