Solved Deleting System Restore Points Selectively - disk usage

[discs]

Hi,

Thank you for WindowsSeven forums. I have just registered but during the last 6 months or so I have used the resources provided here - particularly the tutorials - to set up my Wndows Home Premium x64 system.

Looking at one of the tutorials: http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/336-system-protection-restore-points-delete.html
I have a couple of questions I hope someone can help me with.

Options 3 and 4 of the tutorial cover deleting system restore points selectively with CCleaner or System Restore Explorer.

My questions about doing such selective deletions of restore points with these utilities are:
1. Does it actually save any disk space; or is it simply cleaning up a list so that after the deletion of unneeded ones only the restore points considered useful are presented in the list - whereas system restore disk usage is left unaffected.
2. Is there any risk in deleting restore points at various arbitrary points; are they interdependent? Will deleting some cause a risk of others not working?

Essentially, if it is possible, I would like to keep restore points done at the begiining (after drivers, windows updates and installation of programs etc.) and delete the remaining ones except the most recent one - but I only want to do this to save significant disk space by the selective deletion.

Thank you.

 

[MilesAhead]

Deleting the points does recover disk space. You can see it with
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

You can use this shortcut to make restore points with your comment

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/494-system-restore-point-shortcut.html

Makes it easier to know what happened. For instance before installing a program I may use it and comment "before installing zappos untried newsreader" or whatever.

I would not only rely on restore points. I've heard a thorough disk defrag can mess them up. It's good to also image your system to an external drive. You can find free imaging programs.
There's a list here:

Free Hard Disk Backup and Restore, Hard Disk Image and Cloning Utilities (thefreecountry.com)

But you may find some additional if you search the Software sub-forum on thiis forum.

 

[Brink]

Hello Discs, and welcome to Seven Forums.

In addition to MilesAhead post above, restore points are not interdependent on other restore points. Each restore point is a full and separate restore point.

 

[discs]

Thank you MilesAhead and Brink.

Between you, you have answered both my questions:

- so I will recover disk space - and
- each restore point is full and separate. This is a surprise, since creating a restore point is so incredibly fast - I therefore felt they must be differential/cumulative in some way!

MilesAhead, yes, you are of course right that I should also rely on system images. I have posted a separate question about this (http://www.sevenforums.com/performa...4-system-restore-vs-system-image-restore.html) because I would like to properly understand how to use these different backups (system restore points and image backups) when I do need to do a rollback.