System Restore on Vista - settings question

Hi,

I am running Vista Ultimate and I noticed that I could not restore to
a point I had created manually before I did something to the system a
month or so ago. The reason was the restore point was missing. This
in turn is because Vista created a whole bunch of other restore points
and had ended up overwriting the restore point I had created myself.
Some of the restore points Vista created were due to me installing new
software, however most were just daily restores which did nothing
useful for me.

1.
Is there any way to prevent Vista doing daily restore point
creation ? I am happy for it to create restore points for software
installations, but daily ones are just plain stupid as far as I can
see because they do nothing useful except take up restore point disk
space.

2.
Is there a way of setting a restore point to be non-removable ? I
mean for it not to be overwritten when disk space is reclaimed ?

3.
How can I increase the disk space Vista will use for system restore
points ?

Thanks,

Mike

Mike wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I am running Vista Ultimate and I noticed that I could not restore to
> a point I had created manually before I did something to the system a
> month or so ago. The reason was the restore point was missing. This
> in turn is because Vista created a whole bunch of other restore points
> and had ended up overwriting the restore point I had created myself.
> Some of the restore points Vista created were due to me installing new
> software, however most were just daily restores which did nothing
> useful for me.
>
> 1.
> Is there any way to prevent Vista doing daily restore point
> creation ? I am happy for it to create restore points for software
> installations, but daily ones are just plain stupid as far as I can
> see because they do nothing useful except take up restore point disk
> space.
>
> 2.
> Is there a way of setting a restore point to be non-removable ? I
> mean for it not to be overwritten when disk space is reclaimed ?
>
> 3.
> How can I increase the disk space Vista will use for system restore
> points ?

Here is a link to MVP Bert Kinney's pages about System Restore. Bert has
made System Restore in both XP and Vista his specialty and has detailed
answers to all your questions there.

http://bertk.mvps.org/html/vista.html

However, System Restore is really not appropriate for what you want to
do. You will be far better served by purchasing an external hard drive
and an imaging program such as Acronis True Image. It is a matter of a
few moments to image your system and store the image(s) on the external
hard drive. System Restore is best used to reverse an immediate mistake,
going back only a few days - a week at most.


Malke
--
Elephant Boy Computers
www.elephantboycomputers.com
"Don't Panic!"
MS-MVP Windows - Shell/User