Allocated System Restore space holds far fewer restore points now

[Rick1441]

I have 8gb of space allocated to System Restore, all monitoring my C partition only. This space is always at least 85-90% used according to the System Protection screen. In the past I have had at least 15 restore points to choose from after ticking "show more restore points." But today I went to do a restore and there were only 7 points, despite almost the full 8gb allocation being shown as nearly full, as usual.

This is happening despite relative consistency in the size of my C partition at about 60gb. As always, I have the "restore system settings and previous versions of files" option chosen. And I've checked to ensure none of the drive's other partitions were inadvertently added to monitoring.

I've had Windows 7 for about three months, and saw a similar situation about two months ago. At that point I turned off System Restore and turned it back on, and things returned to normal. But now it's happening again, and this time I don't want to lose the Restore Points I currently have. Besides, the fact that this is happening makes me both curious and uncomfortable.

I've been creating 60% of my restore points manually. Is it possible those, for some reason, use a lot more space than automatically-generated points?

Would appreciate any ideas on what could be going on, and how to address it.

 

[LMiller7]

I suspect that one of your more recent restore points is taking more than the usual amount of space. This can vary widely. This could be due to a newly installed application or some kind of update.

On the few occasions I have used system restore it has always been the most recent restore point. The further back you go the more likely it is that the restore will fail or cause more problems than it solves.

 

[Rick1441]

Thanks, that all makes sense. I have indeed installed some new programs recently. In fact, I think that was the case the last time this issue surfaced, too.