Trying to sort out C drive, I have a question about Restore points

[PhenomIIx4]

I have a 500GB Weston Digital hard drive which I partitioned with C,D,E,F&G.

OS Windows 7 64bit Professional on C drive, then programmes which can be saved to selected drives are on D, pictures and vids on E and very little are on the other partitions.

I partitioned each drive evenly to approx 100GB which is reduced to about 97 odd GB's. My C drive is 83GB's after it has been formatted but filled up about 3 months ago. There was only about 50GB's of programmes so I Googled it and came up with System Restore so I cut the sizes back to a minimum. This gave me about 6 - 8GB's of free space again.

Now C drive is full again (200mb's left).

I don't want to run with no system protection so here is my question......

If I turn "Protection" off on my C,D,E & F partitions/drives can I then enable it on my G drive where there is nearly 93GB's of space and if required would it restore all drives ok? Or do I have to have the Protection "ON" in all the drives in order that it restores software on them?

I hope this makes sense?

 

[DavidE]

Hello PhenomIIx4,

You must have System Protection turned on for each partition that you want to be able to restore.
Having System Protection turned off for "C:" and on for "G:" will not allow you to recover "C:".

A better approach imho is to use System Backup Imaging.
Then you could create Backup Image(s) of "C:" on the "G:" drive and restore the C: drive if/when needed.
System Backup Images are a FULL "copy" of the partition, Restore Points are NOT a FULL copy.
There are several SF tutorials that can help with this if you are interested.

You have a "D:" partition for programs, and have 50GB's of programs, right?
What programs and how much space is used for your programs on the "C:" drive?
How much space is used in your C:\Users folder?

You can use WinDirStat to more easily see where your space is being used.
WinDirStat - Windows Directory Statistics

 

[PhenomIIx4]

Thank you for replying David,

Somehow my Hibernate got turned on recently, I think it may have been when I had a Trojan I couldn't get rid of and McAfee did an online search and destroy :shock: . They may have reset things to default. Consequently I have now turned Hibernate off and now have 6.5gb's of C drive left.

In my C drive Users folder there is 14.4gb's used.

 

[DavidE]

Some other things you can do to pick up some more free space on C:

Move your User data to a different partition
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/18629-user-folders-change-default-location.html

With 10GB RAM you may have a large system managed Pagefile that's really not needed.
You can manually set the Pagefile size to 1GB min and 4GB max.
Type pagefile in the Start Search field, click How to Change the size of virtual memory, follow the help instructions.

Run CCleaner File cleanup utility
CCleaner - PC Optimization and Cleaning - Free Download

Adjust the amount of space used for System Restore
http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/335-system-protection-change-disk-space-usage.html
If you create System Backup Images, Restore Points are not as important IMHO.

You didn't say how much space is used for programs on your C: drive.
If you are a Gamer you could install Games on a different partition.

As an fyi, my C: partition is < 40GB used for Win 7 x64.
User Data is stored on different partitions, and I'm not a Gamer.
The OS and all programs are installed on C: and the OS was installed over 3 years ago.

 

[Britton30]

IT may be better to use only one partition since you have one physical drive. Chopping it up as you describe has no advantage. Then the whole drive is C:\ and all the free space available.

 

[DavidE]

I don't like storing User data on the same partition as my C: (OS + programs) partition.
I like having the ability to recover the OS OR Data independently of each other.
It also allows for smaller/faster System Backup Images...